It may not even be cynical to point to the absurdity of some contemporary philosophy, especially since its being absurd doesn't mean that it's not true.

"But then it wouldn't surprise me, in a sense, because there is nothing so absurd that some philosopher hasn't said it."

Maybe absurd, or maybe crucial to any truly fundamental understanding of the basis of mathematics and its relation to both science and ethics. Given your professed ignorance of philosophy, at this point open minded curiosity might be a more adaptive approach than cynicism.

" If only we could figure out exactly what it's supposed to have to do with that stuff."

I'm happy to give my take on it, but don't know if I'm up for the massive headaches and hostility it will trigger.

"Ethics and maths are two fundamentally different things."
I assume it wouldnt surprise you if I suggested that for a number of contemporary approaches in philosophy maths and ethics do indeed fundamentally interpenetrate. It has something to do with the dependence of math on propositional logic and the dependence of propositional logic on conditions of possibility and the ground of conditions of possibility in perspective and the dependent relation between perspective and will.
Indeed.

Evil is a dangerous thing, in that those who believe in the concept use it a weapon to unknowingly avoid figuring out why someone's else's perspective differs radically from their own. Nietzsche encouraged us to think beyond good and evil, but most arent ready for that yet.
Blame is easier.

The notion of evil is a useful one for philosophies that assume the so-called perpetrator assesses the meaning of a situation for which they are blamed in a way that matches that of their accuser. We say the evildoer knew what they were doing was wrong, implying that heir interpretation of the moral issues involved matched ours and they simply decided to choose the immoral outcome.
The notion of evil is no longer useful for a host of philosophers, including Heidegger, Nietzsche, Derrida, who argue that the origin of evil isnt bad intent but intent that is based on an interpretion of a situation that the accuser doesnt share and cannot understand. The accusation of evil for them is always a call for conformity., blaming the other for our own failure to understand how their perspective(not intent) differs fro ours.

Evil is only knowingly doing harm if the presumption is that the harm isn't justified. But the most important point is that evil is not a real attribute of the one presumably doing wrong, it is our presumption that they are not justified, that they are deliberately and willfully doing unjustified harm. But since everyone believes their actions are justified, evil is our failure to see from the other's own perspective why they believe their actions are justified. Evil is an accusation that arises out of our own ignorance.

"Nature becomes a curmudgeonly gainsayer who can refuse to yield to any determination of theory or sensibility; it will shout "NO!" whenever it bloody well likes and may not speak our language."

If nature does not speak our language then it will not exist for us except as it is translated into our language. Then we will hear nature's 'no' as we interpret any affirmation or negative, as relative to a particular account. That is, its refusal to yield to a determination of theory or sensibility will nonetheless by a refusal that is recognized, that makes sense, and this can only take place through an authorizing scheme. This language-dependency is not unique to human sense-making. A form of it inheres in the sense-making of all living, self-organizing systems. What disturbs a living system only appears as a disturbance, a 'no', in relation to the norms that system sets up via its produced environment.

I'm wanting to add an intermediate between your strong and weak examples. It seems that thinkers following Hegel, such as Quine, Putnam and Kuhn, argue that the universe(or universes) is a process of self-development that we contribute to via our theorizations. The difference between their approaches and those of radical relativists like Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida is that they believe it makes sense to talk about one account being more adaptive than another beyond the historical contingency of conventional norms. Piaget, for instance, likened human cognition to a dynamical system whose eqiulibrations , disequlibrations and reequillibrations at a higher level produces a spiral-shaped evolution of knowledge, a movement from a weaker to a progressively stronger and stabler structure of anticipatory understanding.

Obviously this would not be possible if it did not assume a real world whose functioning produced specific constraints on thinking. So this intermediate claim considers post-Nietzscheans to have gone too far in their relativism. On the other hand ,it rejects the rationalism of Lakatos and Popper, who assume fixed norms as underlying scientific practice.
I suspect such an intermediate position is more appealing to scientists like Lee Smolen and Ilya Prigogine than the Popperian-Lakatos Kantian one.

There are many forms of Cartesian dualism still in effect today. For instance, the mind-body problem, otherwise known as the 'hard problem' presupposes a split between material and subjective reality. this goes directly back to Descartes.
and Kantian subjectivism doesnt overcome Cartesian dualism, it simply reconfigures the nature of the subject-object split. so relativity in physics still presupposes a dualism.

The association between boredom and unpleasant feeling is so strong for most that it might be a good idea to make its absence from your account front and center. Otherwise people are apt to misunderstand you and end up arguing against a straw man. I also suspect that once they realize how you've altered the contemporary definition they will find your approach utterly unobjectionable. Many out there know how to enter a state of peaceful contemplative inactivity.

It seems to me though that you havent addressed this phenomenon that most people do mean by boredom, and that is the experieince of a disturbing loss of meaning.Thats the interesting feature of what most people think of as boredom, not meaningfully contemplative and peaceful experience.

"Don't put our understanding in the way of our understanding. Questioning and inquiry are themselves ways to relate to nature."

Maybe that's because questioning and inquiry are ways to relate to themselves. Maybe the in-between IS where nature is.
Scientists who interpret what they do via Kantain thinking talk about a real world that we mirror through our constructions of it, or as you say, 'mediating between us and natural phenomena".
Postmodern thinking would say instead that the purpose and effect of knowledge is not to represent what is, but to adaptively interact with and thus transform what it theorizes about.
What science does, then , is pragmatically reorganize a world in ways that we can make more or less useful to us. What we get right or wrong, true or false , only makes sense in relation to our changing theoretical norms. As Heidegger says "A science's level of development is determined by the
extent to which it is capable of a crisis in its basic concepts."

Certainly scientists are under no obligation, nor would it be at all helpful for most, to inquire into their presuppositions when they do science. The nature of the way empirical questions are formulated isn't designed for such understanding, which is then left unexamined and implicit. But then one could argue that a field like physics is applied philosophy. Each new scientific advance implies an unexamined shift in philosophical underpinnings. Thats why a history of physics, from Aristotle and the Scholastics through Galileo,and Newton to Einstein parallels the history of philosophy.

Either that , or you're able to avoid feeling bored in situations where others become bored. Heidegger talks about profound boredom as a necessary prelude to authentic Being. But he equates this boredom to authentic anxiety, which seems to be missing from your notion of boredom. Your boredom appears utterly without suffering or unpleasant feeling of any kind, affects which are presupposed in other definitions of boredom. That's why i conclude that you're not talking about the same concept as other philosophers.

You describe your personal experiences of a quiet low-stimulus atmosphere in which "things are going on well" as "blissful apatheia", "life going smoothly". That certainly sounds nice to me. You put the label of 'boredom' on such experiences. One might argue that the reason many philosophical accounts of boredom do not treat it as fondly as you do is that they are not talking about the same affective state as you are. Rather than a state of calm confident, peaceful being, boredom can be understood as a very different way of relating to the world, a a restless inability to find peace. Boredom thought in this way would be what happens when what was for a while a pleasantly unfolding experiencing of a situation begins to falter.

It is when what had been a meaningfully enjoyable, contemplative, peaceful environment starts to seem meaningless or slightly confused. Boredom would be the first warning sign that things are no longer going on well, that one's apatheia is no longer blissful, that life has stopped gong smoothly even if on the surface it would appear that nothing has changed in a situation that had been enjoyable for us up till recently. Boredom would remind us that even the apparently most passive and unreflective state of just being actually involves an active and dynamic engagement in order to have it feel condident , blissful and in order for us. Boredom understood in this way is an incipient form of anxiety and unsureness. That makes boredom a creative affect in that it prompts us to reexamine the way we relate to a situation. It motivates us to try and recapture the sense of flow and movement that we lost. Whether we accomplish this slipping into flow via overt activity or though a quiet meditation, boredom would not itself be a function of how much stimulus we heap on ourselves but how effectively, meaningfully, enjoyably we can glide through our experiences.

Maybe the word youre looking for is flow, or meditative bliss, rather than boredom.

Its from an article called Empathy and Consciousness.
https://evanthompsondotme.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/jcs-empathy.pdf

"This ties back into my demand for you to describe what necessary role humans play in the formation of the ionic bond in sodium chloride - the only right answer is none at all."

On the other hand, from a metaphysical perspective one could argue as philosopher and perceptual researcher Evan Thompson does:

"The problem cannot be ‘How do we go from mind-independent nature to subjectivity and
consciousness?’ because natural objects and properties are not intrinsically identifiable ; they are identifiable only in relation to the ‘conceptual imputations’ of intersubjective experience."

"If we had a complete, canonical, objective, physicalist account of the natural world, including all
the physical facts of the brain and the organism, would it conceptually or logically entail the subjective facts of consciousness? If this account would not entail these facts, then consciousness must be an additional, non-natural property of the world. One problem with this whole way of setting up the issue, however, is that it presupposes we can make sense of the very notion of a single, canonical, physicalist description of the world, which is highly doubtful, and that in arriving (or at any rate
approaching) such a description, we are attaining a viewpoint that does not in any way
presuppose our own cognition and lived experience."

We would kill each other like sharks if thats the best we could do in terms of our coping in our world. If the idea of killing each other like sharks bothered us ,as is the intent of your bringing up that example here, the question becomes, what is the relation between this being bothered by a community of cannibals and morality?

Or , more specifically, since we already know how we have traditionally thought about our attempts to deal with our being bothered by interhuman violence, how could one understand a community that successfully minimizes interhuman violence without a traditional moral system?
The way that post modern, poststructuralist radical relativist discourses answer this is that interhuman violence is connected with the inability to relate to an other who appears alien to us. We dont do violence to ourselves generally, and those who we identify with as like ourselves(generally family and friends). Good and Evil have been replaced for poststructuralists by the opportunity recognized within any era of culture to encourage the ability to see the other as not alien. Their morality is not about enforcing a belief system , it is about encouraging the multiplying of belief systems. It is an ethic of diversification, which is what deconstruction is about. Radical relativism sees the protection from hating each other to death as freeing individuals and communities from being stuck in any given system of truth. If there is an evil for them it is the interruption of movement and transformation in thinking in general. 'Evil' for them is no longer something bound up with the content of particular beliefs, laws, actions but the very settling for any specific content as THE TRUTH.

Maybe you could spell it out. What if we take a time machine to a hypthesized time when everyone thinks like Nietzsche. Then no one would make use of morality or justification or law or standard or ethics. They would talk instead of contingent perspectives that organize the world for each of us. They would recognize communities of loosely overlapping interests but without claims being made for rightness or wrongness. Instead, there would be relatively adaptive(for ourselves) adjustments each of us can make within the context of particular engagements within a community. If we would still want to call this an ethics it would change the meaning of ethics to the variabillty of effectiveness personal coping within situations. A more ethical comportment would be one where one's understanding more effectively allowed one to make one's way.

Proof that intentionally boiling babies is morally wrong:

1. Boiling babies causes them pain.
2. Pain is bad.
3. Therefore the effect of boiling babies is bad.
4. Intentionally performing an action whose effect is bad is morally wrong.
5. Therefore boiling babies is morally wrong.

Justifying moral truths on the basis of syllogisms runs into the same difficulty as grounding truth in general in syllogisms. Formal logic is only as 'true' as the underlying presuppositions grounding the thinking of objective causality. There's a history to this thinking, which gets itself into trouble after Godel, Putnam and Quine. There was the discovery that language gets in the way of grounding logical assertions. An assertion has to be communicated, and there is no interpretation -free communication of an assertion about the world.

"My issue is if you chose as best you can to place yourself close to subjective end, you are forgoing the right to evaluate the moral judgment of others. It can't just be subjective for you. Nietzsche has to assume the guy stabbing him in the back with a knife is just listening to his particular truth, and his personal morality based on that truth."

Nietzsche could conclude, for instance, that the man stabbing him in the back was operating on the basis of an assessment that not only the man, but Nietzsche himself, could accept as justified given the man's understanding. The act, then could be thought of as akin to a shark attacking me. I don't blame the shark ,any more than I would blame wind for knocking a tree onto me.
So here we have the assessment of unpleasantness without the attribution of blame or guilt or evil to the perpetrator of that unpleasantness. IS this still a moral issue or a pragmatic issue of figuring out how to defend myself against back-stabbers, shark attacks and falling trees?

"The greater experimentation and deviation of the 1960s doesn't make the 1950s a period of conformity. Maybe it was just a period of "normality"."

I was born in 1959. I remember the years between 1965 and 1968 as being like the scene in the Wizard of OZ, when everything changed from black and white to vivid technicolor. IT was dramatic, disturbing and incredibly exciting. My brother and I felt like we and our peers were from a different planet from our parents. The older generation that we knew were so profoundly out of the loop in terms of their ability to relate to our language a, music, fashion, that it was like the adults in the Peanuts cartoons, who never really make an appearance. Watch a youtube video of a rock group performing on Ed Sullivan or Dean Martin in the mid 60's and you'll see a bizarre scene of musicians wearing outfits that one could still see today as retro-hip fashion on a teenager. But in the audience you'll see a sea of 50's uniforms, suits and ties on the men and formal outfits on the women that could have come from the 30's or 40's. A complete disconnect, except among the kids in the audience. That kind of abrupt schism in a society is a rarity. Its not that each generation doesnt move away fro the previous. Its the extraordinary rapidity of the change that was so unique in the 1960's.

And at the heart of it wasn't just the desire to party or the effects of television and prosperity. It was something deeper, involving a shift in philosophical worldview. That's what gave the social revolution its power. The twilight zone could frighten people in 1960 because the idea of alternative realities was terrifying to a culture raised on reality as objective truth. By the late 1960's being a freak was a badge of honor and a desirable goal for the counterculture.

A scene in the documentary Berkley in the 60's encapsulated the change in worldview. The campus activism began in Berkley by earnest students who had cut their teeth on the civil rights movement, and represented a kind of continuity with the leftist and communist movements of the 30's. But somewhere around 1966 a much deeper, more visionary shift took place in their thinking, as hippies and political activists began to cross-pollinate. Student began shifting from chanting 'we shall overcome' to 'We all live in a Yellow submarine'. They had become psychedelicized, seeing their opposition to the old ways not just in the traditional political terms of resistance, but as an entirely new worldview with implications for every aspect of life, for the sexual to the spiritual to the social.
Certainly the majority of those who grew their hair long, took drugs or participated in Woodstock didn't buy into the most radically life-altering thinking that the leaders of the cultural movement did, but they were a part of it in some way.

What I miss most about that period between 1962 and 1972 is the incredible momentum of movement of thinking, making movies from 1959 seem like a different century from those of 1969. It spoiled me. I assumed that this rate of social change would persist in to my adulthood. instead what I encountered was a retrenchment, increasing cautiousness and endless regurgitating of themes that emerged in that era. It's been 50 years since that era, and yet
the derivative Zizek , Butler and the anti-hegemomic tropes of #metoo and #blacklivesmatter are all we have to show for it.

"Tell me any meaningful difference between what you propose as subjective, and those beliefs are to a high degree objectively immoral. Just some coincidence that the vast majority of subjective moralist all view them the same way ?"

Clearly, any aspect of human behavior to which standards, laws and prohibitions are applied cannot considered morally relative in an absolute sense. A word like murder, as opposed to killing, presupposes the intentional violation of a standard.

But its important to see that there are different kinds of moral relativisms. Maybe the easiest way to approach 'relativism' to start from meaning relativism, since morality cannot be determined without first having a theory of truth, since any understanding of morality and ethics begins from what truth is taken to be. So lets see how the notion of truth relativism has evolved with regards to the understanding of science.
It could be argued that Descartes was the first relativist in that he recognized that humans construct theories of truth rather than simply directly observing it in the world as earlier philosophers believed. So Descartes was the first to realize that truth is relative to a model of the world.But Descartes still believed that scientific and moral truth were a function of mirroring, through cognition, the way things are in the world. Kant radicalized Descartes by arguing that not only is truth a function of our constructions and concepts, but that those concepts can never get at a final exhaustive truth (we cannot reach the thing in itself). So for Kant truth is relative to our evolving schemes. In science we can disprove but never exhaustively prove any theory. The truth of any scientific theory is contestable. But we can assymptotically approximate ultimate truth. He modeled his moral theory on this idea of universal truth that we have to assume but never see directly.

This is Kant's moral relativism. Hegel did Kant one better by seeing truth as relative not only to our holistic schemes but sees those schemes and categories themselves as evolving. So Hegel introduced the idea of cultural relativism. Each culture's moral standards are on the way to something true in a totalistic sense but they havent arrived there yet. Marx took Hegel's idealist dialectic of moral truth and put it in the material plane of human economic arrangements. Marx kept the idea of morality as a cultural becoming, however. We become morally better through the dialectical development of economic arrangements.
Nietzsche was among the first to throw out this idea that becoming is an improvement toward some ultimate telos, challenging us to think beyond good and evil. For him there is no moral progress or progress of truth, only contingent perspectives that cannot be arranged according to conformity with an ultimate reality.
So Nietzsche gives us a relativism from top to bottom, with no grounding or telos. People often ask, how does one keep one's own philosophy of radical relativism from being itself a morality in claiming itself as a truth? The answer is that the terms of such a philosophy are meant to be contestable and internally self-reflexive. SO Nietzschean truth is not truth in the traditional sense. It is more a being-in-transformation.

“Generational speach is not strictly 'generational', at least not just biopolitical. It refers also (and mostly) to the material conditions that came to be historically associated with those cohorts.”

Shared Material conditions are way too broad a metric to differentiate a multitude of world views within a generation, or even a family.

There’s no mention by you of specific ideologies embraced by hippie leaders , from zen to Marcuse to existentialism and Schopenhauer. This is the core of the diverse set of the ideas that did indeeed
represent a revolutionary break with precious social mores.
Since the music played a central role in spreading such ideas, it’s worth mentioning the amount of mutual borrowing and influence tha went back and forth between artists, black and white. Motown artists covered Dylan and the Beatles as much as the Stones covered Motown.
Huey Newton and the panthers incorporated yippie theater and subversive lsd inspired themes. James brown led to parliament funkadelic , and
Psychedleicized funk. Marvin Gaye embraces feeemlove and mysticism on ‘What’s going on’.
So there was much overlap in the direction of new ideas n put forth by black and white, despite the differences.

"You cant have your relative moral view, without allowing all the possible relative moral views of others and still be a moral relativist."

I want to quote a passage from one of the most notorious radical relativist philosophers, Jacques Derrida. Here he is defending deconstruction against charges that it denies the possibility of determining truth in any sense. What he is trying to say here is that while any ultimate, universal, god-given grounding of truth, moral or otherwise, is not possible, within specific contexts, one must be able to make such moral determinations. That is , ,one must be able to choose from among "all the possible relative moral views of others" those which are on the 'right tack' and those that arent.

I see his view here as consonant with other moral relativistic philosophers that i have read.
.
"For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie "] ,
a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how
amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the
following argument: Since the deconstructionist (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-
relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of
meaning, in intention or "meaning-to-say, " how can he demand of us that we
read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text
be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood,
simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and
discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition
of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it
supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous
texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread. Then perhaps
it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated
with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in
more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And that within interpretive contexts
(that is, within relations of force that are always differential-for example,
socio-political-institutional-but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively
stable, sometimes apparently almost unshakeable, it should be possible to
invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith,
lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy." Derrida, Limited, Inc.

Every notable philosopher, whether relatlvist , realist or platonist, has a position that they believe is original in some way, and in some sense superioir or preferable to competing positions (more clarifying, truer, more primordial, more comprehensive). If that philosopjher begins from a thinking of radical relativism (Nietzsche, Derrida, Fouccault, Heidegger) they would not want to justify distinguishing ways of thinking in terms of 'correctness', but they would be able to distinguish them on the basis of constricted vs expanded awareness, or lesser vs greater potentiality of transformation of meaning. So a morality applies to relativistic philosophy, but a different sort than that of traditional judgements of correctness, truth or falsity.

"What I think about everything else is entirely irrelevant in the context of this discussion. This discussion is about morality, and regarding that, I am a moral relativist. Relativism, more broadly, is a red herring."
If you were to say that you believe the history of scientific or technological understanding is a linear progression it would be difficult to deny that such a view would color what moral relativism means to you. It would certain distinguish your notion of moral relativism from that of someone who thought that scientific history is a relativistic genealogy rather than a progressive teleology.

What specific instincts was H.M. displaying? Does instinct here mean following a hard-wired program or just stereotypical behavior lacking inhibition?

Sounds like you're a Heideggerian.

The radicality of Heidegger shows itself in his understanding of mood as inseparable from the f self-transformative basis of Being itself, his understanding of temporality as always ahead of itself in a radical anticipation which makes past, present and future belong to each other, and his elimination of categorical distinctions between sensation, perception, cognition, willing, desiring and affect.

"Understanding is never free floating, but always attuned. The there is equiprimordially disclosed by mood, or else closed off." "The different modes of Befindlichkeit ... have long been well-known ontically under the terms 'affects' and 'feelings'(138)" Attunement brings Da-sein before its thrownness in such a way that the latter is not known as such, but is disclosed far more primordially in "how one is." Being thrown means existentially to find oneself in such and such a way."(Being and Time)

"All understanding is essentially related to an affective self-finding which belongs to understanding itself. To be affectively self-finding is the formal structure of what we call mood, passion, affect, and the like, which are constitutive for all comportment toward beings, although they do not by themselves alone make such comportment possible but always only in one with understanding, which gives its light to each mood, each passion, each affect. Being itself, if indeed we understand it, must somehow or other be projected upon something. This does not mean that in this projection being must be objectively apprehended or interpreted and defined, conceptually comprehended, as something objectively apprehended. Being is projected upon something from which it becomes understandable, but in an unobjective way. It is understood as yet pre- conceptually, without a logos; we therefore call it the pre-ontological understanding of being."(Basic Problems of Phenomenology)

On the other hand, you had mentioned Nozick in a previous post. Martha Nussbaum's views overlap Nozick's, and if this is close to your thinking, then perhaps you are in accord with Nussbaum's neo-Kantian model of affect and emotion.
As far as the relation between bodily feedback and the awareness of affect, the argument of manuy in contemporary cog sci emotion theory would be that while our conscious experience of affectivty, mood ,emotion is the result of a complex integrative process involving situational interpretation, memory, langauge and bodily feedback
, if one removes the somatic feedback the experience of affect is severely attenuated.

What do Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, Jerry Garcia, the Beatles, Robert Crumb, Jane and Peter Fonda, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, James Brown , Muhammad Ali, Janis Joplin , Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol and Ken Kesey have in common? Technically, none of them were Baby Boomers(1946-62).
The Boomers didnt invent the counterculture, they just jumped on the bandwagon. Musically, Boomers were more likely to have contributed to post-'60's trends like punk, disco and new wave.

"The young people these days, however, have a lot in common with the baby boomers of that time. They are passionate about big issues, they take a strong stance against corruption and oppression, and many of them are attracted to the same beliefs to which the baby boomers were attracted when they were younger."

To the extent that has any meaning beyond a broad generallzation, that would be precisely why the young people these days are exactly the opposite of the vanguard of the counterculture.
The measure of a movement's significance is bound up with how strongly it departs form the norms of the previous establishment. The norms handed down by the 60's counterculture(thinking outside the box, political activism, etc) have become the very definition of establishment thinking, which is =why so many millenialls and Z'ers still admire so much about the hippies. A social revolution as radicallizing as what took place 50 years ago would have to discover a new fork in the road that leaves behind the by-now stale , stifling 5 decade old rhetorical tropes that contemporary activists conform to.

We could turn the tables on the argument. Instead of arguing that animals as well as humans are self- conscious, we could take the post-modern turn and argue for surface over depth. that is to say, post-modern and post-structuralist philosophy and psychology critiques the Enlightenment notion of human though as uniquely capable of becoming aware of itself as a thinking creature(Cogito ergo sum). The mertaphysical idea of self-knowing would be the idea that we have an emotion and then we can turn our attention to our awareness of being aware. Rather than arguing that animals are also capable of this, the postmodern move is to deny that we somehow climb on top of our experiences such as to gain a meta-position from which to observe them. This illusion of height or depth is the result of overlooking the fact that the act of attempting such a recursive reflection transforms the basis of the meaning we are trying to enclose within our meta-awareness. So what seems like going deeper or higher is merely a modification of the previous meaning. I feel afraid one minute. The next I say that I am examining the fear itself as fear and this is the essence of human self-knowing. But animals not only feel afraid, they can also be aware of the feeling of fear in itself . One can artificially induce symptoms that mimic fear with an adrenaline shot, an an animal will interpret the bodily sensations as fear.

It comes down to a question of what awareness means, and what purpose its serves in the first place.
Philosophical Pragmatism tells us that awareness is a relation, an activity, a transformation , a way of interacting with the world to effect a change.It is not a passive looking .So if a single act of awareness takes us from here to there, then a second act, rather than going deeper within the first act, is a further accomplishment of resituating our meaningful relations with the world. So what the metaphysical thinking of self-awareness would consider a bring oneself closer to oneself is in fact a moving further away from ones prior self in each subsequent act of reflection. In a way one could argue that it is animals which are more self-aware than us humans if the measure of self-knowledge is the preserving of a static sense of self. It is we who transform our sense of ourselves more continuously, and do this in an accelerative manner over the course of human history. Awareness is adaptive not to the extent that it reifies a particular sense of self, but by virtue of its reconstituting what it refers back to. Adaptive self-awareness endlessly multiplies and invents new versions of self.

You have to be careful in how you're undertanding a concept like 'reason'.
Traditionally, it tends to be equated with objectivity and logic, and that's a dead end as far as understanding actual sense-making phenomenologically. Logic treats meaning within an artificially closed universe,

Isn't CBT based on the idea that our cognitive appraisals trigger particular affects? The differnce as I see between CBT and writers like Gendlin, Kelly and Heidegger is that CBT likens cognitive schemes as conditioned habits that one can become stuck in, whereas the latter posit thinking not as conditioned responses but as active attempts to interpret our world that can fail when events exceed the bounds of our anticipative accounts, requiring us to act as scietists and artists at the same time, becoming experimental and creatively exploratory, testing out new hypotheses, trying them out for size.

Heidegger, Eugene Gendlin and George Kelly are among the philosophers and psychologists who have abandoned the attempt to separate feeling-affect-emotion from cognition and reason. And following neurologists like Antonio Damasio, enactive embodided cognitive psychologists like Shaun Gallagher, Matthew Ratcliffe and Evan Thompson also see affect and cognition as inseparable at all levels of functioning.
Affectivity provides the sense, direction and significance of though, how and why things matter to us.
We think of intense emotion as 'irrational' when what those experiences represent are periods of a crisis of thinking, when our way of making sense are no longer effective and the world begins to appear incoherent, That is not a capture of intellect by emotion but a crisis in the intellect itself. We are anticipative creatures, and negative affects like far, grief, anger, and guilt signal transitions in our sense-making, when formerly effective schemes of anticipative comportment toward others and ourselves break down. That is why such affects are both painful and potentially creative. They represent where the limits of our understanding lie.

Are you afraid of that stress, think it shoudnt be there , surprised or disappointed by it? Piaget would argue that the stress diminishes in proportion to progress in our worldviews. It allows us to more and more effectively anticipate the world, and particularly the world of other human thinking and norms. Stress isnt just finding ourselves on the outs with respect to other persons' outlooks and norms, its our inablity to understand why they hold the views they do.

keep in mind also that sources of stress are very often not simply an individual's opposition to group norms but an individual's opposition to their own previously held personal norms. Guilt typically is an affect that arises when we have 'grown out of' certain ways that we used to think and value, but didn't realize we did until it brought] us into conflict with others we used to be in agreement with.

"can be quite stressful, harmful, and negative in general, whether it is good for the system as a whole or not" The system I had in mind was one's own, not some amorphous Hegelian community. I was channeling Piaget, who likened the vector of cognitive assimilation to a self-organizing dynamicial system. Of course disequilibrium is painful, that's what negative affect is to Piaget, the expression of a personal system needing to reorganize itself at a higher level. In a more general sense, negative affects like fear, guilt and sadness signal aspects of our construed world that lie outside of the range of our system's ability to assimilate them, where the world no longer makes sense to us as it did previously and we need to creatively reform and broaden our categories of understanding.

"program used by the species to make sure survival takes place"

What I like about enactivist approaches to human cognition is their tying together survival and the continuous self-reinvention of a self-organizing system. This takes place in a dynamic coordination between the setting up of norms among indivuduals and the overcoming of those norms. Following and resisting social structures are equally important to survival via their reciprocally dependent roles in adaptive cultural evolution. We know that equilibration in dynamical systems is a spiral movement in which a given state of equilibrium is disrupted, leading to the eventual formation of a higher and more stable state of equilibrium. Our capacity to not only follow rules but at certain points to find ourselves alienated from those rules would seem to be the way we manifest the dialectical vector of human becoming.

" I don't believe that animals even know they like or dislike something over and on top of the primary emotion they feel."

Neither do humans. Its not over and on top of.
" It is that secondary level of consciousness I am talking about."

You have the topography wrong. What makes it a 'level', implying height or hierarchy or depth, instead of simply a changing of subject? Isnt insight just as much a going elsewhere as a going deeper?
Realization, insight and reflection is a sequential unfolding in time, not a simultaneous elevated meta-thought. It is a further articulation and transformation of a previous thinking. Knowing you dislike something is a a further discovery about that thing.

How does this differ from an animal's investigating a situation such as to uncover further details of it?
Is the difference the human awareness of self? I heard a rumor that self is just a heuristic concept used for convenience to give the illusion of subjective control. It doesnt really exist. And as I said earlier, both humans and other animals bring to their present experiencing the whole of their past as a kind of focaled framing of the meaning of the current context. So a person using the contrivance of 'self' awareness or the animal meaningfully unfolding their world in investigating an aspect of it are on a par in carrying forward the existential situation as a whole.

"So we can override our initial dislike." That's kind of an incoherent concept. Dislike is a specific evaluative affect rendered as it is a t a given time. It is not something to be overridden,. Either it changes or its doesn't. If you want to say our attitude changes then thats a change in the specific quality of dislike. If there's no change in the specific attitude then whatever change or realization takes place isnt any kind of 'overriding", it s a change of a different sort, pertaining to other aspects of our situation tangential to our evaluation of dislike. It could be a way the dislike becomes fleshed out in a particular direction or via particular aspects or colorations or via changes in its ongoing rhythm of intensity.

Your notion of a difference in kind between human and animal cognition seems to rest on your understanding of linguistic conceptual complexity not just as sophistication ofcontent but as a different kind of mechanism of organization of concepts relative to animals. It seems for you to have something to do with a supposed human capacity, thanks to language , to survey a situation as a whole, something that other animals can't do. Maybe you subscribe to theory-theory approaches in cognitive science, which model human understanding in terms of consulting internal conceptual structures in order to reflectively understand the world and ourselves.

Enactivist approaches in cognitive science disagree with the theory-theory approach, positing instead that in interacting with others, either empathically or in other respects, we dont consult an inner script or internal cognitive-linguistic structures in order to understand the actions of others. Our apprehension is direct. This is because our entire history as it is represented in mental-bodily meaning structures encounters the world as an integral whole. that is to say, we bring our whole existential history to bear on the current situation , whether we do this in explicit contemplation of our 'existential situation as whole' or not, and whether we are concerned with just one trivial particular or ontology. So this is not a capacity or skill, its a given.

This would be a capacity not unique to humans, and therefore this notion of exploring 'our existential situation as a whole' would not be unique to us. Chimps experience the world moment to moment in relation to the cutting edge of their history with it as a whole, and if they dont conceptualize it linguistically, they feel it meaningfully. The deep affective capabilities of higher animals attest to this holistic comportment toward the present. Musicians create in this way, relying not on word concept but on intuitive feeling. One could say, then, that the animal's "existential situation as a whole' is registered as an art in the way it forms the continual background directly informing and shaping their meaningful engagement with the world moment to moment. I question whether explicitly linguistically conceptualizing something like existential situation as a whole is necessary in order to know it, and thus act on it meaningfully as a whole..

"Other animal species cannot reflect and evaluate whether they like or dislike their current emotional state and then, have to justify continuing doing an unpleasant task for expediency."
Why does this require linguistic capacities? What do you think reflection is? Describe its mechanics for me.I think the key here is your term 'current', as if the current emotional state stays static, just sitting there waiting for this pristine mechanism of linguistically mediated reflection to turn back itself around to survey the picture. It implies that we need word concepts to store and preserve meanings such that we can manipulate meaning and defy the passage of time. It implies that we need a word concept for our current emotion, that we need word concepts for the reflective acts which turn back to examine our emotion word concept.

But the advantage of word concepts is not that they store and preserve, but that they express more complex and abstract meanings than those that other animals construct.The act of reflection is not itself dependent on word concepts. Reflection is a function of the way that human and animal consciousness of time carries the immediate past into the present and also protends the present into the future, making our experience of the present anticipatory. These three aspects(retention, the present and anticipation, are all simultaneously a part of the experience of the 'now' moment We reflect naturally in that what we have just experienced continues to be carried over into our current 'now'. It's not so much that in reflection wwe turn back to what we just experienced, but that what we just experienced automatically carries itself forward into our present thinking.

So reflection in its primordial sense is not a function of will, choice, deliberation. It is automatic, with or without word concepts. What word concepts do for us is expand our options when we reflect, and, by organizing a meaning context into a richer whole, that context remains for us to reflect on in a more consistent and continuous manner. If there is 'freedom' of the will, it is not due to the capacity for reflection, it is a function of the complexity of the concepts that our words express. If humans are freer than animals, than modern humans must be freer than neolithic humans, and adults freer than children.

Time consciousness is what allows animals to do this:

"There is a famous psychology experiment in which children are left in a room with one marshmallow each. They are told that if they wait and don’t eat the sweet straight away, they will be given a second one. On average, preschool kids resist for less than 10 minutes.
What happens if animals are given a comparable test? A group of chimpanzees performed roughly as well as children — some resisted for up to 18 minutes. They even used the same tactics as children, distracting themselves with toys. Meanwhile, an African grey parrot withstood temptation for up to 15 minutes. " (Frans De Waal)