I am not denying a “standpoint or framing” but in fact am claiming the “standpoint or framing” is fundamental to the natural world. There are no trees in themselves, there are only trees in the context under which those trees are identified. If I point to something and say “look at that tree over there,” I am identifying the tree from the standpoint/framing of a conscious human being looking at the tree with my ape-like brain and ape-like eyes, on planet earth, in the 21st century, at a particular time of day, etc, etc.

There is always a context in which real things are identified, and nothing exists independently of the context of its identification. It is meaningless to speak of a “tree-in-itself,” a tree that exists conceptually independent of any context. That is just a purely metaphysical tree without ontic reality. As Wittgenstein would say, if you want to find the reality of a thing, “don’t think, look!” You won’t find it by arguing over the precise definitions or language or mathematical description of the reality of the metaphysical tree. You will find it by just looking, just experiencing the actual context under which the concept of “tree” is actually being employed to identify something in a real-world situation. That is the real tree.

A real dog is not what I find when I go to read Wikipedia, nor it is some big diagram of its biological processes, or some mathematical description of a dog given by physicists. One must not confuse the map for the territory. A real dog is Rusty who I cried when he past away and buried him in my backyard. These models given by encyclopedias or in science textbooks can be helpful as maps in understanding my real dog, but at the end of the day, they are only maps, the real dog is the one I can hold in my arms, feel his warmth, and rub my hands through his fur.

My dog, as I experienced him was from the context, the standpoint/framing, of myself, and thus depends as much on myself as it does the dog, but there is nothing fundamental about me in this description. Another person could do the same, and they would also describe the dog from their own framing/standpoint, from their own context. We can even talk about objects within contexts not tied to a conscious being at all. I can put a camera on a toy boat and let it float down the river, and later collect it and review its footage. I can apply the same theory of mind I do to other humans to explain what it recorded by considering that what it recorded was the real world from its own context, its own standpoint/framing, as it floated down the river.

Of course, I cannot ask the camera how it felt when it saw what it saw, but that is just because it doesn’t have a limbic system. Such a question would not even make much sense in that context.

What is fundamental to reality precisely is standpoint/framing, i.e. the context, under which we are talking about the reality of a thing. The mistake people make is to conflate the fundamentality of context with subjectivity. Subjectivity and context are not the same thing. If I am sitting on a bench watching a train go by, and you are in the train, we would both experience the train to be traveling at different velocities. Indeed, if we both held a radar gun and tried to measure its velocity, we would physically measure different velocities.

Does that make the velocity of the train subjective? Of course not. Velocity is a real, objective feature of the real world, and has real-world consequences. You, riding the train, are in its path yet are unharmed. If I stepped in the train’s path from the bench, I would die, and nobody would be confused as to how I died because “velocity is just subjective.” We all understand this difference in velocity to be an objective feature of the world. The velocity of the train really is different between observers, it really does depend upon your standpoint and frame of reference. It is not subjective.

Reality is deeply contextual. Only very, very few things remain consistent when you change reference frames, such as acceleration and invariable properties of particles, like intrinsic mass and charge. But most everything else is depend upon perspective, upon context. There are just barely enough things consistent between perspectives to give rise to the feeling of a shared reality.