What I am talking about is a narrative. As an example, say you are a college student who upon starting your term meet friends with extreme views on institutional racism. When the topic comes up you mention your views towards admission processes in favour of 'blind' or non-compensatory techniques. In their eyes you become a racist, but maybe not to yourself. Meanwhile, their friends all agree and pretty soon everyone looks at you with disgust as if you are constantly thinking racist thoughts. Being constantly forced to operate within this environment, do you think you might start to take your difference from their view as an affirmation of it? Your belief that they are wrong transforms in what it was meant to be all along: a belief – instilled by your enemy – that you are different from them under the lines they themselves have demarcated.

Haven't you seen similar villain narratives, where a social group hints that it wants your evil to legitimate their good? One would be surprised at what any person can become when they are immersed in a set of such opposing ideas.

I am arguing that proper leftists are so deluded with their ideological obsession that they are willing to consciously ignore the unmistakably recognizable contradictions ...so much so that almost every position they occupy appears dishonest and false.

I get what you're saying, and I have encountered such type of thinking, but don't see any evidence that it is answerable solely to a liberal mindset. How can you tell that their coincidence is not related to some common factor? Or maybe you are just defining these faults to be Leftism. Furthermore, can the political dividing lines you are drawing not equally incite individuals to take on those roles knowingly in order to prove their difference from your side, as per some similar ethical idea they wish to abide by that belongs to the other's domain?

The problem here involves a socio-political orientation that is wrought with contradictions. Namely that it criticizes western civilization for being this incredible monolithic structure of oppression, while fighting that very oppression with uniquely Western ideals like equal rights and social progress.

Okay so you’re talking about hypocrites basically. I still don’t see what this has to do with democratic or liberal politics besides some incidental particularity or correlation of the present day.

I didn't come up with that, I'm just trying to keep up with how leftists think. It was a famous wise Leftist that wrote…

Good quote. It seems as if your concern is with an abstract idea of freedom, but it’s halfway to inappropriately becoming about politics. You’re defining a difference, ‘I do not believe this (set of notions), and there is a group who has this ethos.’ Then adding, ‘Therefore, if you subscribe to this ethos you are a part of this group.’ It is a logical fallacy that you are likely used to seeing used against you, as it is the ‘old way’ of doing business. Just be clear that this is business and not much more.

These are people who have a strong commitment to collectivism and egalitarianism. In recent times, the left has taken on an adversarial disposition towards the liberal principles of freedom and progress.

I think you have cheated here. You have used the word ‘Leftist’ to contain an admixture of subject and predicates. It is no longer descriptive word, but has become the grounds for the tautology of ‘X are the problem, because they are people with this problem. All you have accomplished is put a name to a bunch of integrated predicates, which does not help describe who you’re talking about or what the problem is.

However, I don’t mean to diminish your concerns, because they are still real and valid. But doing this makes your argument about cultural power as opposed to knowledge or wisdom, and it is thus not really philosophy. I mean, after all, who does not believe in collectivism and egalitarianism? We must be more descriptive of the subjects involved, what the problem is, and then and only then can there be any meaningful analysis.

Is “Western Civilization”, the very foundation self-criticism regarding ideas like universal rights, due process, and Western philosophy itself unfairly and unthinkingly maligned by educators and leftists for some kind of relativism or one-way version of rights?

Who are these leftists, and why is their devotion to one of four two-dimensional directions make them an enemy?

If sea levels rise and catastrophic weather events continue, think of all the money that will be spent repairing infrastructure, relocating climate refugees, and in efforts to make new use of land. That means a massive number of Asians, Africans, Central and South Americans will be forced to relocate to your country and there will be much less tenable space inside it to share. This is because many of the worlds cities will become unlivable, and the least repairable will be those in third world countries. That is what the current models predict will happen if global warming is allowed to continue.

Why do humans want to escape their mind and avoid reality?

Why would a being that is characteristically good and strong do something weak and bad? Among the other animals, we have the ability to engage with the internal contradiction of strength and weakness in the 'will.' The reason why your question promotes such internal division is that it doesn't include the question, 'Is the good an act of virtue exclusive of will and the aim of an ideal life?'

As an example, consider yourself in a class of those who admire physical strength and agility. You might think it virtuous to train every day and become the strongest imaginable. If you realized that aim, both friends and enemies would have to follow your example and you would foster a society where everyone is strong. It is now harder to survive, and life seems to incur only pain. But that pain of losing out could also be a good, and maybe didn't even realize you had that to start with.

The true representation of the modern will is normally not thought of as something that instills the simple and universally categorical without thought. The modern will needs thought not only to define itself but in order to reach its real aims. I think Aristotle was one of the first to arrive at that conclusion.

Well sure. "What" counts as the most basic existing phenomenological agent and why are the relevant questions I am asking.

So you are interested in right. What right we grant such an agent, and what constitutes right to such an agent. We are talking about agreement between humans about what’s like us, and what’s not like us. The only way to know ‘what it’s like,’ would be to define said quality based on human experience and determine if it is there or not. There is no way to tell if we have actually captured any sort of moral ‘what it’s likeness.’ That would be the kind of knowledge that actually means something.

I have great trepidation about what would happen if people really thought they knew ‘what it’s like’ to be another being. Namely because there is no a way for a computer program to truly know it’s own errors in the sense that humans do. It entails actuality.

Can you elaborate? If a sponge reacts to its environment, this is a behavior. But most don't think it's conscious or has feeling associated with it. A snail might react to light perhaps this is purely behavior or perhaps there is a "feeling" associated. At what point is the divide?

The problem here is we are utilizing and extending the word 'Consciousness' synchronically to mean more than it means diachronically. It is now an umbrella term that means the whole lot of subjectivity, spirit, existence, autonomy, intelligence, right, citizenship, etc. It's used as if to suggest that because something is conscious it deserves to be treated with essential rights. We respect the lives of humans more than animals and sponges, because of factors extending beyond the idea that they have consciousness. It is just for the very reason that one cannot tell what beings are conscious agents except by certain cues, and that's really all we mean when we use the word; it is a word for a phenomenological agent by definition.

Panpsychism means that there is some sort of experiential-ness to matter/energy at some level (where these "occasions of experience" inhere or at what level is a different story).

Which we now consider common sense. Unless you take the view that the activity of matter depends on or is directed by it, which is another story. To suggest otherwise would be as homunculus as you can possibly get. That there is a little man with the controls inside who is seeing existence unfiltered, and he decides whether or not to think or consider things independently, and is thus controlled by another homunculus ad infinitum as far as I understand the concept.

I am not proposing it, everyone more or less already uses this category. It would be ridiculous to suggest your experience of reality was true and unfiltered projection of an exterior world. That green was in the leaf is sort of silly, no?

So I was asking the serious question:
How many behaviors makes a feeling? And no one cared about that, and it's crucial.

Having a behaviour implies an observational objective, but observation is also a competing objective in itself. And homunculus returns.

OK, are you singling me out now for not getting homunculus funkulus? I think I should be forgiven for said transgression.

Not sure what you’re getting at here. And the humunculus references are not helping.

What is PanMaterialism? I Googled it and found nothing.

"The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific"

What these viewpoints have in common is a propensity to stop short at an end. To exist within an idea and to know it from within. I feel as though giving religion and science a name was a bad idea. They have become a red herring in philosophy.

I more or less agree, full scale materialism is a bit ridiculous. It sounds like what you are really concerned with is existence itself. When we consider everything from inside a rational structure, do we always have a blind spot?

It seems like your plan is to beat materialism in kind with a material notion of spirit, a consciousness that is essentially the antiquated form of spirit itself, as the divine inside a divine subject. It is the idea of Jesus Christ, the embodiment of the divine in human form. And this whole thing seems caught in this post-Christian paradigm. In it we are constantly avoiding a notion of spirit while still operating within it.

Or maybe this higher level consciousness rests in empty actuality.

I hold that there is no such thing as two words that mean the same thing.

The purpose of the question was to ask you, 'do you consider consciousness to be something explainable via the scientific method, or something also actual and not explainable.' From your offence to my earlier posts about lack of explainability I assumed you would immediately choose the AI program, but maybe I was wrong in that judgement.

Imagine you were able to develop a scientific model of consciousness that was so effective, you would put all the world's psychiatrists out of business. So you were forced to choose one. What would you choose? Ignore the factor of putting them out of a job for now, and assume they would easily find other jobs.

Of course we might throw up our hands and just say that God wants some people to be autistic, schizophrenic, bipolar, etc. I find considering scientifically informed speculation to be of vastly greater practical and humanistic value.

So do you thereby think applying the scientific method to an individual by a scientifically informed individual is superior to being psychoanalyzed by a psychiatrist? Would you prefer mental diagnosis made by an AI algorithm, as is currently being performed with some success, as opposed to another human? Which do you think will understand your condition of life better?

You're right, I am not that informed on scientific explanations of consciousness, as opposed to scientific inquiry pertaining to consciousness, because I think there is no point in explaining it scientifically with speculations instead of observations. By all means please prove me wrong by demonstrating the ways in which there is.

The first thing an organism has to do - any organism - is to establish a boundary between itself and the environment. What organic processes then do is all directed by the organism maintaining itself and continuing to exist. I’m considering the idea that this constitutes the beginning of of subjective awareness

You have already posited the subject as existing in the line 'the organism has to establish a boundary...' So the subject is then object, since all these boundaries begin to become established by objective means, as in fertilization from cells created through biological processes. It sounds like you are including the idea of Becoming as referenced by @Gnomon if I am not correct. Care to elaborate?

Yeah sure, but you aren't hu-mansplaining consciousness, are you? I have no problems with rigorous scientific inquiry.

Because it's fundamental to what organisms are. It's the specific difference between even very simple organisms, and inorganic matter.

Could you clarify, are you saying subjectivity is fundamental to what organisms are or what is fundamental to what organisms are is subjectivity? In other words, are you simply defining what is fundamental to organisms as subjectivity or stating that what organisms are has the fundamental quality of subjectivity?

What about the subject that observes the subject and equates its subjectivity? I take it we are conveying a fully self-consciously anthropomorphic view of subjectivity. Flies having less subjectivty, humans the most, diatoms none, etc.

Not sure what you are accusing me of here. But here is an article discussing the scientific propositions (at a high level for a broad audience, but based on harder scientific studies)

Thanks for sharing, it's an interesting article with a stupid title. But I find this some and what @wonderer1 is saying extremely interesting. What is the point of explaining consciousness? It is a fruitless and useless exercise in vain-glory. Sometimes it feels like the whole point of it is to supply a vehicle for a vain attempt at proclaiming the nature of reality as deterministic; essentially the cinders of post-christian abstraction. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about you specifically here. Just saying so because it is seeming like this is maybe is coming off more trollish than socratic at this point. For instance, what was the meaning of juxtasposing this specific article into our conversation after the line below?

You are leveraging this Darwinian outlook to claim a hypothesis that it rests on simple content has already been fulfilled.

The kind of consciousness I am talking about wouldn't necessitate "rationality" but some sort of "awareness" of the environment, something akin to a "point of view" or "something it is like to be something".

So you agree in the claim an identity of consciousness=subjectivity, so we are back again to 1600's Descartes philosophy.

There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

I agree, but where does the grounds come in to elevate the subject to such ultimate precedence? After all, once consciousness becomes subjective it begins to posit a Cartesian subject, and thus the tables are turned and the scientific explanation is really explaining the manifestations of the subject and leaving out the objective.

I see no reason why not to extend the concept of consciousness to ordinary objects like a rock or a waterfall that are not even able to move themselves. They still constitute subjects in the sense that cues of existence come from conscious perception and are described by the same internal concept of cohesion (ie: having internal self-representing qualities). Why is there nothing of consciousness in a rock? Because we define consciousness by the negation of our determination of a rock, neglecting its real essential continuation to ourselves. Because we seek imagination over analysis.

My challenge is to understand what this fundamental difference between the two is.

If this is the aim of your work, an excellent topic. You are onto something here...

That right there is the essence of the origins of the hard problem of consciousness.

This speculation is where a problem of logical extension is occurring. The essence of consciousness may or may not include other components than simple rationality and functional neural networks; if a computer program could read it's own code, would it totally understand from that it's own place in the world as a computer program? You are leveraging this Darwinian outlook to claim a hypothesis that it rests on simple content has already been fulfilled. It has now become ideology and is no longer the scientific inquiry front that it was formerly impersonating. It works because you have made no scientific assumptions, but have included ontological ones instead, that do not affect the structure of the synthetic propositions outlined.

In the end, doesn't the sponge have just as much to do with consciousness and mentality? Of course the sponge can't have a point of view, if what you mean by that is a mental 'map' of its own conscious life. But I might suggest that the sponge still could be said to have concrete being 'for itself.' Even in terms of its atomic structure, if you want to dabble in the scientific, it is built in such a way as to cohere itself and have a unified being that is continually representing its essential qualities. I might go as far as saying that it might not be possible to talk about mind or spirituality without considering matter not purely in content but also as a whole.

So, in trying to evaluate that premise, we're immediately thrust into a self-reflexive loop that is also highly abstract. (I would have said "form without content," though you characterize it the opposite way.)

Yes, exactly. In evaluating the premise – based on the idea that it is part of one functional philosophical system among many equally valid and having this constitute its grounding – lends it to an abstract domain of objectivity.

I'm not sure whether, or why, this detracts from the argumentative weight of any one particular premise, or whether the "system" aspect is important here. I do see that it highlights a foundational problem about argumentation, and if that's mainly what you mean, it's a good point.

A philosophical system of any real value can't be self-objectifying in this way without falling into a lull of blind subjectivity of no serious use. I consider it a mistake to take the work of Kant, Hume, etc. as complete philosophical systems that are equally true and valid, while we play the neutral subject observing their writing as an interplay of conflicting logic.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the question you are asking is something close to, 'Does the idea of a philosophical system detract from the argumentative weight of a premise?' My answer to that would be 'yes,' because the premise in that case becomes the idea of the premise in itself. It now has been given the character of a content that is devoid of form.

when you also claim veracity for the premises, you’ve moved from rational argument to reasonable claim, to making a plausible case that could be countered by an equally plausible alternative.

So in your view ‘reasonable claim’ inherently involves a claim that can be countered. Is this really characteristic of it being reasonable, or only of it being a claim? If it were characteristic of reasonableness, then why does it necessitate multiple valid viewpoints? If that were the case, reason would be reference to pure subjectivity and thus not reason at all, no?

The role of psychology is yet a different matter.

Different from what?

So let me re-pose the problem in two ways. First, notice that when an important question receives competing reasonable answers in philosophy, there’s almost certainly a meta-question involved. That question focuses on what are the correct or convincing ways to argue rationally on that topic.

And why does this take the form of a question, when none of those concerned are interested in looking for a truth that they are not already in possession of?

Second... is it possible that the often frustrating morass of competing “reasonable” claims might be a revealing wake-up call about rationality itself, and its role in philosophy? How far could such a critique be taken?

This seems to be falling into the trap of considering reason to be purely objective. 'Competing reason' is an oxymoron. In my experience, competing claims are 80% a concern of psychology and 20% rationality at best... and that goes for philosophical argumentation too.

It could be argued that reason in contemporary culture lacks the kind of lodestar that was formerly provided by religion. After all, it was suppose to provide the summum bonum, the reason for all reasons. But then religion seems itself to have demolished that ideal, when viewed through the history of religious conflict in Western culture.

How do you mean it has been demolished, by what/whom?

I think you ought to narrow down a little more what you are referring to by 'self.' We can talk about self as a representation, a logical function, or even the notion of reflection itself. For instance, does this implied subject need to be made aware that it is a self in order to deserve the name?

If we are to have any value come out of the sciences, other than technology, it would be getting a better synthesis of what could have happened, or is the case, in regards to nature based on the evidence we have, and honing that or creating a better interpretation.

Yes, but you have pulled a switcheroo on the word 'value,' which is here supposed to mean 'applications to.' We're not talking about science as having any value beyond analytic and synthetic proposals that convey the essence of a thing. They are not going to be the key that unlocks reason, consciousness, the meaning of life, or any other glossy-eyed delusions.

Also, not all evolutionary theories are "Just so", per se, but descriptive. A "just so" story might be something like, "Our ancestor's propensity for favoring the strongest alpha male, is why we have a strong tendency towards fascism". But, a theory that describes how language evolved in humans by examining various models that fit the evidence from artifacts, brain development and anatomy, developmental psychology, etc. might be a legitimately descriptive theory?

For me, the 'just so' is a product of both the orator and listener. It is our quickness to accept scientific statements along with their baggage that is the particular quality that makes them attractive as carriers for non-scientific ideology. More often than not, it seems of a kind of positivity bias, a juxtaposition of scientific imagery that is that it presents itself in a language of form. Primates used logic to express immediate need. This led to further development of x part of the brain that mediates language, etc. Statements like this carry baggage, like for instance the idea of the individual narrative, the modern self, and the accidental. These are not particular to the quality of the science, but inherited by the form of the storytelling.

My point (perhaps requiring clarification) is that the reasoning behind why some drugs are legal and others are not, is an unsystematic historical legacy of confusions and the work of interest groups.

And so being reason as it is, what are some of the ways this is taken in itself? What were these confused people really trying to do in these subjective 'mistakes' that they made? They were, I suppose acting in the interests of themselves, their families, the ideas that constituted their free world of religion, thought, and love. All of the ways in which they sought their own freedom were in the relinquishment what would transform their own, their families, and their fellow citizen's ideology.

They did violence to those who thought and believed in the opposite, but it was more than just a war of hearts and minds. Some of those freedoms were were valid in themselves. There was real pain in women taking drugs and being sold into prostitution, or drug-induced neglect of addicts families, real pain in those who were subject to blind and draconian rules that would lead them to reject adult life for being told they could not use drugs or go to specific parties and affiliate with certain peers, etc. It was elevated above their own subjectivity, because it was recognized as above and beyond the typical and ordinary causality of the enforcers, pushers, and common interest groups.

Can it be taken into a subjective point of view to say, 'They should legalize because of this' or 'They should make it illegal because of that,' and completely set aside the whole historical and political context because it is against the subjective enlightenment of the elites?

Look at the trajectory of most political and historical decisions. This demonstrates that what dominates is not a free process of careful reasoning, but a variety of other factors that impose on decisions.

If we take reason as the logical thought process of an enlightened individual, then yes. While I agree, that historical and political decisions are mostly driven by corrupt ambitions and necessity, this in itself does not constitute an antithesis to reason a priori.

Enlightened subjectivity is never without internal contradiction of being classed as reason. Reason is characterized by that contradiction rather than through it. It’s not reasonable for you to wish to defeat your enemy and for your enemy to wish to defeat you. It is reasonable that you and your enemy will wish to defeat each other, both for itself and in itself. This is not my idea, of course, but comes from my interpretation of German idealism of the eighteenth/nineteenth century.

So I’d tend to disagree about the statement that the flow of history is unreasonable. Even our very notion of reason has it’s origin in the endless bloodshed of politics and history.

It's clear that policies of interdiction and prohibition are historical and political and don't follow reason.

Its a big statement to say history and politics don’t follow reason. Care to unpack that one?

The impact drugs have on people is often more about why they take them and how they take them.

And why, do you think, they do take them?

This is the one and perhaps sole case where that does seem to happen. As you said,

As Spooner wrote, vices are not crimes. If one is not allowed to do what he wants to his own person and property, there is no such thing as right, liberty, or property.

What more personal property do you consider yourself to own, in the subjective viewpoint, than your own mind? And yet this question seems to transcend pure subjectivity. Drugs are considered the cause and not the agent, because as a whole we believe there is an effect of drugs on the mind that tends to wrong.

What is the basis: tradition, experience, data, speculation, envy, hate?

Are we talking decay of the head or the heart?

Note that in most parts of the world this already happens. Consider public education. In your view, the state should back off and thus allow the strongest to determine what the ethical life should be. But isn’t this the very thing you despise most about state intervention: the corruption aspect?