Start with Shannon entropy. Information about X reduces it by reducing the range of expected states of X. But we can reduce Shannon entropy by barking commands or laughing contemptuously. The analysis of language rarely places enough emphasis on context, because it is impossible to gather all contextual evidence. But if I call you Boo-key it might mean the world to you, or it might mean nothing, depending on our shared history.

An important role in language is preparing the reader/listener for ... possibly nothing ... but possibly something important that would have otherwise have been missed. By redirecting the sensitivity of the listener, language does not always deliver the message in person. "Look!"

Why are we talking about realism, when we don't even know what realism is? Is it a direct relationship to reality? But we don't know what reality is. Phenomenology hates the term "reality", because it can't be grounded in a clear method; all approaches rely on assumptions about the very things they are holding up for examination -- methods of description, validation by others, the list goes on. The problem is the term itself -- it is infected with presumption.

"OK," you say, "we just can't do ontology. But how can we trust the public arena, if reality itself cannot be pinned down?" We trust the arena in a Wittgensteinian sense -- we play by shared rules and make progress thereby. But every game contains an element of risk, because every meaning we can identify is anchored in a yet to be satisfied arc of completion. We are tilted toward the future, and as such we are tilted, unavoidably, toward uncertainty.

Attempts to make this uncertainty certain are the work of tyrants. It takes a twisted agenda to deny the rickety and half-baked nature of the human condition. Follow the tyrant, and you lose touch with humanity; seek solace in certainty, and you will have to bury your failures in denial.

There is no "reality", the sharing of which comes without strings. Nor can we avoid the sharing. Let's just not pretend otherwise.

The inquiry should begin with "what special characteristic of animals/humans enables them to be sentient?" The whys and hows of conscious experience can't be explored if we can't answer this first question.

OK. So, what is so special about organisms? It may be that they maintain atomic-level spontaneity, by being able to amplify the effects of events as small as a single electron excitation. It is not impossible for a single photon to initiate a cascade-response throughout the organism. This doesn't necessarily mean we are "tuned into" the quantum universe, but what it does mean is that organisms are vertically responsive -- whatever has guided our evolution has done it in a way that preserves the sensitivity of literally billions of micro-systems that make up our bodies, and enables these sensitivities to be marshaled into organism-level responses.

So, does this sensitivity cause sentience? A radio antenna does not cause radio waves, but we would be tempted to think it does if antennae provided our only evidence of them. We can apply the same argument to sentience. The micro-sensitivity of organisms is like a choir of a billion voices -- not in unison, but influencing and responding to each other. Organisms constitute the only example we have of this kind of complexity, but again, the complexity is not necessarily the cause of sentience; rather it is what enables organisms to participate "creatively" in whatever sentience is.

Now, we may speculate that sentience is everywhere, or we may speculate that every energy event has an experiential component; these would be two versions of panpsychism. Let's say that some version of panpsychism is true. Organic micro-sensitivity would enable organic systems, like nervous systems. to experience and amplify orchestrated sensitivity. While inorganic structures are not excluded from whatever sentience is, their inability to amplify micro-sensitivity would exclude them from any form of activity that reveals the presence of sentience.

"S="What I am holding now in my hand is an apple."
Is S philosophy?"

The logical positivists argued over just such statements, but I suppose they would say they weren't concerned with the apple (or its holder), but the referential significance of "apple". What is the relationship between "apple" and an apple?

We pay too little attention to who is getting attention, and why. There may have been a hundred Descarteses, but the one who got the attention came at the right time to be the quotable source of substance dualism, as soon as it could escape Papal wrath. Similarly, logical positivism was being paid attention to just at the time that computers were a gleam in their inventors' eyes. By working out the limits of Boolean logic, they were the precursors of the cursor, and come to us in a history that is constantly rewriting itself using different fonts of emphasis.

To hark back to Socrates and Plato is to exhume the epistemological transition from oral to written "truth", during which we realize that written statements can be temporarily true (or, more interestingly, temporarily false). That is, a new methodology of validation was required, which solidified categories, and the universal/particular and substance/accident distinctions. These are all flawed systems that have provided logicians with employment ever since. I wouldn't waste my time trying to squeeze higher meaning out of any of them.

By "perspective", I meant the narrative and experiential perspective that is me. I agree that we can take various positions on ideas and beliefs, but experientially there is only the one me.

I believe that anyone who holds the position of solipsism must have a deeper agenda, answering the question, "So what?" And I mistrust all such agenda. Hence my tongue-in-cheekitude.

It cannot be denied that there IS only one of YOUR perspective. It requires a leap of faith to believe that there are other perspectives. OK. But every referential statement requires a similar leap of faith. You cannot prove that this moment actually followed the last moment. Maybe you are a fragmented collection of moments that all contain memories of entire lifetimes. Maybe you only exist for one moment. THIS ONE. Solipsism is one of the least creative of alternative ontologies. No wonder solipsists are so lonely..

An organism is not an assembly of independent parts. An assembly does not contain the history of its development. But an organism evolves by modifications of its systems, and can only understand itself by understanding the relationships that form its developmental history. Each generation of cells emerged from within the environment of the previous generation, and retains all of the dependencies that shaped that emergence. It has always been thus, so your identity already relies on its transformational history.