u/likescacti

I'm about to begin my 4th year in a cognitive psychology PhD. Hopefully, only got \~2 years left.

Back in undergrad, I took intro to cognitive psychology. I loved learning about attention and sensorimotor systems. My undergrad advisor recommended I look at jobs in human factors. The idea I could study cool basic attention stuff and then apply for jobs that might let me use some of those skills? Sounded great.

But if I'm honest, I am in a very basic lab. Studying body-centric mappings (don't want to say more due to privacy). The work is very much "for the sake of advancing this niche theory" and not really tied to any clear "application". I love the research. But I'm starting to think more about what's next in life.

Has anyone ever been in a similar situation? What did you do to start preparing yourself for a more industry oriented career approach while still working in a very academic lab environment? Has anyone actually made the cog psychology to HF job hop and succeeded?

I'm not a philosopher and I only vaguely follow some philosophy of mind type literature as I'm working on a PhD in cognitive science.

The other day I was thinking what is subjectivity? Like what is a "subjective thing"? The top definition on Google was "how an individual's personal perceptions, feelings, beliefs, and desires shape their understanding of the world". Which sounds reasonable and seems to capture what people tend to mean by it.

But the more I thought about it, it seems to just be insisting it's essentially anything cognitive. With the exception of low-level pre-attentive sensorimotor processing.

Like, I'm sure they aren't insisting that because humans first have to learn (through experience and semantic development) that 5 × 3 = 15, doesn't mean that 5 x 3 = 15 is a subjective belief. Which I know is just cherry-picking at a Google definition. But still, I'm curious if philosophy has any more fleshed out takes on what it subjectivity *is?*