Getting back to the OP, the interesting thing is this idea of a simulation that would somehow be all our consciousnesses, plus the world we think we share. Is anyone stopping to think what this would entail?

What even is the hypothesis?

Is there one fake world and then somehow a whole lot of fake minds having private thoughts, feelings and understandings of it?

Or is there only one fake mind and that mind is the entire world as such, any others appearing in this world being merely fake furnishing?

Give a computer a Hex code of 000000, have it add FF, and the result is 0000FF. This is the hex code for blue, and it tells the computer to turn on the blue lamps that each make up part of a pixel.

Only in our scenario that biological computer isn't told to turn on a blue light but to activate the parts of its "brain" that are responsible for bringing about a blue colour experience. — Michael

Love it. A computer can be programmed to operate a light switch. Therefore a conscious computer is possible. [Hands wave furiously.]

So how is it that neural firing would "look blue"? How is this little trick achieved? What is it that we know "in principle" here that would warrant your extrapolation.

The problem is not that you are talking nonsense. It is that you don’t even know its nonsense.

But, suffice to say, that the sense that the domain of empirical experience is in some sense a simulation, is quite true — Wayfarer

That’s like saying the eye is like a camera. It might get the conversation started, then you get serious.

Take for instance the evidence from sensory deprivation experiments. Without a world forcing the brain into some kind of stabilising state of interpretation, then experience and thought just fall apart.

There is no Cartesian theatre, no running simulation, that is a consciousness standing apart from the world. The idea of the mind as a stable entity, a soul stuff, is what underpins the naivety computationalists.

Neurology depends on its own instability being regulated by its running interaction with a world. It becomes constrained by its environment to have an appropriate level of fixed or habitual response.

So the simulation story is just dualism warmed over. Sensory deprivation reveals that being in a definite and organised state of mind is not about a concrete act of world simulation but an enactive state of world interpretation. The infinite garbled possibility the dreaming mind can conjure up is stabilised by whatever the available regularities of the environment happen to be.

Strewth. So life on earth began when a sperm met an ovum and organisms arose.

The article I linked to explains that biological computers can do this. — Michael

Sure. You can build a Turing machine out of anything. Even meat, or string and tin cans. So long as it is eternally stable and entropically unlimited. That is rather the point.

Meanwhile over here in reality, a very different game is going on. I’m asking you to focus on that.

I don't think it's controversial to think that a sufficiently advanced civilization can create biological computers that function somewhat like the human brain, complete with consciousness — Michael

If you don't find it controversial then you might want to question how well you understand the biology of brains, and indeed the biology of biology.

A) Machine - stable parts.

B) Life - unstable parts.

So what if we considered biological computers running these simulations instead? — Michael

Again, first show that “running a simulation” is something a biocomputer could even do. Then we are still left with the basic point that a simulation is not a reality as it is divorced from any material consequences due to being founded on an artificial stability.

Biology arises because material instability - criticality - offers a suitable foundation for the informational regulation of that instability. That is the whole deal. So using meat to imitate stable computational hardware is missing the point of what actually defines life and mind. If it is perfect for Turing computation, you have ruled out the very thing - the material instability - which life and mind exist to regulate.

You made some marks appear on my screen - 2, 100, 1,000,000. And so the party started.

Numbers stand for acts of counting. Some set of marks to be scratched or instances to be recorded. The efficiency of a notation shouldn’t fool you that symbols don’t need grounding. Every act of reference is also a physical event.

I don't understand the relevance of your questions. — Michael

Huh? You asked me “what about biological computers?”

Well. An example if you please.

And why would that be?

Point to information that exists without a physical mark then.

Do you have one?

Computation does rely on being able to produce a frictionless world. But yes. My point is that that is in the end a thermodynamic fiction.

There is always a cost attached to every time a symbol is written, a gate is switched. The cost is simply being made the same for any such informational action. And as small as possible.

Likewise, your car engine will always eventually wear out. The hardened parts will erode with use. I like the fact that car design has reached the stage where all the parts have been strengthened to the exact degree that they will all tend to fail about the same time.

So the mechanical is about stepping outside the usual entropic deal - the world of self organised flows like rivers, plate tectonics and solar flares - to control what is going on with rigid material form and imposed systems of informationally operated switches, gates and timing devices.

And yet all that machinery still erodes. Friction can be minimised but never eradicated. Dissipation wins in the end.

Yeah. If we are talking about neural network architectures, then we are starting to talk about legitimate attempts to follow the path of biological realism. And I doubt you would find neural networkers spending a lot of time worrying about whether we are figments of a matrix simulation.

If life and mind are defined by information that has material consequences, then be suspicious of all claims that talk about plays of information without material consequence.

A pattern running on a computer is just syntax. Symbol processing. It still takes an actual biological being to read the pattern as having meaning and thus wanting to act on it in some way. The material consequences are what give a modelling relation with the world any semantics.

If you think that life and mind are just essentially machines, then you will be forever insensitive to the chasm that in fact exists between the biological and the mechanical. Life is based on the physics of dissipative structures. And the mechanical is defined by its insensitivity to entropic reality.

The parts constituting a machine are essentially dead in being fixed and stable. The parts constituting an organism are essentially unstable - poised to fall. And that is how regulating information can actually insert itself into the material equation and determine which way the instability will fall.

Standard semiotics. Rosen’s modelling relation in a nutshell. The concept is the the theory, the generality, and what it has to produce is the act of measurement, the particular example, the sign that the concept is true of the world about which it makes a modelling claim.

It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon ‐ based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon ‐ based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well. — Bostrom

This claim of multirealisabilty has in fact been deeply challenged by research into the biophysics of life over the past decade.

Everything biological hinges on the ability of informational mechanisms, like genes and neurons, to regulate entropic metabolic flows, like proton gradients and electron respiratory chains. So this biology, this set up, now seems so special, life and mind could only arise with very specific “hardware”.

This familiar assumption of cogsci, and hence 1980s philosophy of mind, now sounds horribly dated.

Sure. That would be one of the things in demand of support to constitute an argument.

Where is it plausible that any amount of computational simulation adds up to be anything like a conscious biological organism?

I realise it is fashionable to take it for granted. But enough science exists to say let’s see a little more evidence and a lot less handwaving.

Could you distill your qualms with Musk's argument? — Posty McPostface

Are you taking the piss?

Again, the claim being made is too confused for QM to be an actual issue. But if the laws of physics are taken as a constraint on the realisation of computational simulations, then you can’t gaily exponentiate that infinite computation ensures anything is then possible.

And that is before we get on to the biological constraints.

Which argument are you finding so impressive then - that we are most likely all the figments of a simulation, or that if this were the case, then the reality beyond our simulation would be "boring"?

If we dismiss the first, what can be said about the second?

I think you are still stuck with the observer issue. The analogy is that we make movies as a heightened reality - life with the boring bits taken out.

But it is a higher intelligence - the clever writer or director - that is constructing these heightened realities for us as their consumers. Sure, the filming process might be boring (well even that doesn't ring true). But the world beyond a Matrix simulation isn't going to be some mindless world - a computational substrate that for no reason, in some fashion that is quite different to the laws of physics as we understand them, also wants to generate these heightened realities with fictional observers within them, and no actual observer without.

If you actually stop to analyse this op-ed for any proper philosophical argument, it is just a bunch of handwaving fragments.

You can sort of see what Musk is going for there. If the ultimate reality is some kind of computational multiverse, then in blind fashion, that might just construct these random simulations of every kind of reality. And by the workings of infinite chance, that will generate bizarre creations like our world where we are simulated people, in a simulated world, complete with simulated physical laws and simulated biological histories.

The laws of physics don't seem to forbid this computational multiverse, you say. Again that is totally questionable given the holographic limits on physical computation. But then, by the light of the hypothesis itself, who could even care about this caveat if those laws are just going to be the simulated features of some randomly generated scenario?

There are just so many holes and loose ends in a short few paragraphs. I see no argument as such. Simply fashionably muddled thought.

Any observer or participants of that shared reality. — Posty McPostface

But are you claiming those observers/participants to be themselves physically real or computationally simulated? You are failing to flesh out the critical part of the argument. Thus there is no "argument" as such.

I think that as long as the laws of physics don't prohibit such a reality from occurring, then it's possible and guaranteed to occur given enough time. — Posty McPostface

That's a view. And I say that anyone who understands biology as well as they understand computation can see why its inadequate as "a sound argument".

So I've asked you to show you understand the biological constraints on "simulating consciousness". But - like Musk - you don't want to clearly commit to having to place your observers/participants on some side of that tricky line.

The argument is that virtual reality tech can be so good that we don't know the difference. Biology can already be fooled by skilled programming. And we can imagine that fooling progressing exponentially - particularly because we can be so willing to immerse ourselves in the "reality" of our fictional movie and gaming worlds. The laws of physics don't even come into it. The nature of our biology has this in-built capacity to learn to believe anything to be real.

But it takes real food to nourish the gamer's body. Real diseases can kill it. At some point, civilisation does interrupt the fantasy being spun exponentially here. As Musk also admits....

Or civilization will end. Either one of those two things will occur.

How so? His argument is sound. — Posty McPostface

So if you assume any rate of improvement at all, then [virtual reality video] games will be indistinguishable from reality. — Musk

Indistinguishable to who? Are you and me going to be actual real witnesses to this shared simulation, or are we simulations of those witnesses and thus part of the simulation too?

You think there is an argument here, rather than the usual hand-waving based on having also watched the Matrix?

At what point is the biology of consciousness shown to be replicable by "computational simulation"?

It feels like we are the biological boot-loader for AI effectively. We are building progressively greater intelligence. — Musk

I think if you understood biology as well as you understood tech, then you would realise how much more amazing the biology still is.

So this is 99% bullshit.

Now human culture is amazing. And we are finding all sorts of ways to evolve and augment that through our tech mastery. Machines amplify our control over material reality, giving us a means to act out our fantasies. AI - or really great pattern recognition machines - is one of those kinds of tools.

But simulation is essentially pointless. Life and mind are about a modelling relation with the world. Simulation appeals because it seems to be modelling without limits. But it is also then modelling without consequences. Someone would have to explain why that would be of any real interest. There is a missing bit to the argument right there.

That part would make sense, but the part about a democracy is completely irrelevant to it. — Terrapin Station

OK. But how would a nation state have legitimacy unless it claims to speak for the people who constitute it? So being a democracy would seem perfectly relevant in being the most transparent possible way of legitimatising that operational sense of national identity.

What's not obvious is the notion that you cannot have legimitate power and a democracy in a nation state without a national identity. — Terrapin Station

I'm disagreeing with Fukuyama's assertion that if not-P, then not-Q is true. That conditional rather seems to be a complete non-sequitur with zero support. — Terrapin Station

But the positive claim here would be that you can't have "a nation state" unless there is some identity that indeed characterises that nation as being that nation. The legitimacy resides in that identity and fulfilling those goals. If there is no identity, then there is no nation to speak of.

So regardless of whether the identity is "land of the free", or "land of the white and powerful", it is obvious surely that any claimed legitimacy flows from the national story of what a country is about?

You seem to think that I'm asking questions about identity. I'm not. I'm challenging a purported logical implication. — Terrapin Station

Is it logical, or even factual, that any nation doesn't have a concern for its identity? Every country wants to tell some story about who it is and what defines it. It is a human necessity.

You are saying that a nation doesn't have to have some foundation myth, some positive sense of self. Yet anthropology tells you want a dumb position that is. Humans just are that way. To suggest that an abstract kind of statehood would be possible is like trying to persuade the world to speak Esperanto. :)

Therefore, why should it be axiomatic that "marginalized groups" cannot do this balancing act too? Or to put it another way, how is wanting to be recognized an attack upon the "public shared space" by default? — Valentinus

Marginalized groups increasingly demanded not only that laws and institutions treat them as equal to dominant groups but also that the broader society recognize and even celebrate the intrinsic differences that set them apart. — Fukuyama

So if we zero in on this, what would be the democratic ideal then?

I'm not familiar with your definition of "public shared space". But I take it to be an idealised notion of a commons where we all get serviced by a standard civic infrastructure and show some standard balance of tolerance~consideration. So get up close, and does this public shared space rightfully carry the higher demand that we recognise, celebrate and even perhaps love all our differences? Doesn't this in itself undermine the public right to form your own communities or in-groups in the "usual way" - the usual way involving what you as a community stand against, as well as what you stand for?

So there is a problem if we expect the public shared space not to organise itself in the normal social fashion with signifiers to separate the in-group from the out-group. There are always going to be haters and prejudices just because that is how social dynamics generally works. It is nature in action, so to speak.

The job of a public shared space is to then provide a "neutral" arena where the rules of etiquette are minimal enough that there is both a practical respect or tolerance for difference, but also a maximal possibility for free self-expression by communities, whatever size they happen to be.

Militant SJW types are criticised for being intolerant of intolerance. And I think Fukuyama would have a point that identity politics extremists do go too far in that direction. That would be a legitimate complaint. (Just as the dominant mainstream would possibly make the matching mistake of tolerating intolerance that "goes too far" ... too far by some prevailing balancing norm...)

So it is not axiomatic that marginalised groups can't understand what a balanced public shared space would look like. But it is one thing to want equality - or indeed, demand not to be actively oppressed - and another to want to be "recognised and celebrated" for whatever differences you might have to express.

Thus the functional neutrality of the public shared space could be under attack from both directions as Fukuyama argues. What do you think about the marginalised also having some right to be "celebrated". Is that necessary to the underlying social compact?

...he is against identity politics and sees it as a danger for a functioning democracy as both sides, the left and the right has embraced this kind of politics. — ssu

They push for cohesion within their group but that can stand in varying levels of tension with the "shared public space" that is specifically kept free of the workings of any particular voluntary community. — Valentinus

The problem would seem to be the internet. The new shared public space without a stabilising "memory" to fix some sort of useful social goal in mind.

It is quite normal and indeed functional to have polarities or dichotomies. And the most productive divisions are those that are metaphysically complete - as in same vs different, competition vs co-operation, one vs many, integration vs differentiation, particular vs general. So a healthy society will be expressing some constructive balance of its tensions.

However, social discourse has changed in some essential way as it has moved from the old civics media age to the new social media age. As with everything, the internet disintermediates. It removes all the intermediaries that stand in the middle and "slowed things down". This removal of the middle ground can be free-ing. But it can also remove a lot of the machinery that represents some kind of collectively-adaptive memory. Sometimes things are being slowed down for good reason. Public institutions frame long-term truths and goals. They are designed to change slowly so that societies can be pointed towards long-term aims.

The social media internet strips out the kinds of checks and balances the old media had. Again, the old media had a lot of problems. It was in the pocket of the corporates and the states. On the other hand, governments and big business also represented institutional interests. They were part of the wisdom stabilising their societies in pursuit of relatively agreed long-term goals.

So the central question for me is about the nature of the internet as the new underpinning infrastructure of social discourse. Will it develop a sufficiently cohesive sense of purpose? Will it rise above the memes and hypes enough to develop far-sighted constraints?

The US might seem a hot mess for sure. But what is happening in India, or Ghana, or Chile? What does the new world order look like in terms of developing a modern institutional form?

I'm not assuming it is working, or not working. There sure is plenty of dysfunction any time you turn on the news. However that would seem the critical question. Trump and social justice warriors and all the other nonsense could be the true end of the old Enlightenment dream. Or it might be the noise masking the real deeper world social changes that will manifest.

Identity politics is clearly a symptom - but of what exactly?

Maybe the silliest part of Fukuyama's position would be the attempt to frame it still as a left vs right kind of thing. That feels so stale - the US dealing with its own "reds under the bed" existential threat. Or Europe still dealing with its industrial era class wars.

And then every generation has to discover what is going to be the agenda for social change. That is natural. So you have arguably the trajectory of 1950s counter-culture, 1980s slacker culture, 2010s inclusiveness culture. There is some kind of thread in breaking the mould, mainstreaming individuality, collectivising the consequences.

What is happening in the US seems a bit of a sideshow. How much is explained just by the particular kind of urban~rural divide that characterises the states? Is that such a thing anywhere else in the world?

So it seems complicated. But the left vs right lens probably tells us very little of interest.

Social discourse in general has embraced the internet. And that is going to look like something for a start - disruptive, disintermediated, ADHD. Worldwide, bigger things are going on. And in claiming both left and right are embracing identity politics/demolishing democracy, Fukuyama is mashing up the progressive and the conservative, the inclusive and the privileging, the young and the old, the urban and the rural, and all the other natural polarities that are the historical dynamics that need to be more clearly understood.

They push for cohesion within their group but that can stand in varying levels of tension with the "shared public space" that is specifically kept free of the workings of any particular voluntary community. — Valentinus

Sure. I take it as basic to social structure that there is always a tension between the individual and the collective, the competitive and the co-operative. That dynamic is in itself the healthy one that a well-adapted social system is going to foster.

So my point was really that churches fit the democratic/enlightenment scheme because they are essentially pro-social. They foster community more than division. And then once the balance tips, we start calling it a cult, a sect, or whatever. That church is now seen as a divisive threat to the general public fabric.

So in the bigger picture, the modern version of religious tolerance is a way to neutralise churches as political forces. It gets them out of the workings of the state and gives them a community building role, along with sports clubs and all the other community level institutions.

I think this just helps to define the line when it comes to the assimilation vs multiculturalism debate. As a modern society, there is some optimal balance we would want to strike.

We can kind of sense how much diversity, how much homogeneity, is a healthy balance. And we wouldn't thus think that either diversity or homogeneity in themselves were the desirable goals. A sophisticated political position would be wanting more of both, not more of just one or other. And beyond that, more of both up to some understanding of what the long term social goal would be.

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Another fatal flaw committed by Fukuyama through assigning a divisive animus to all forms of self identification, per se, is that it provides no explanation why all forms of life protected by the Establishment of Religion clause have failed to destroy the country yet. The whole point of setting up a shared public space this way was in order to allow groups to withdraw from it as much as they like as long as those actions do not cancel the shared public space. — Valentinus

This is an interesting point. But aren't churches different because they express the other side of the coin rather strongly - the push for identity-suppressing social cohesion? They are tools for conformity and so "safe" in that sense.

So, she may have been rather more like Ildefonso (and less like Victor, the feral child) than habitually portrayed. — Pierre-Normand

The whole feral child literature is a minefield of romanticisation. The writer, Maxim Gorky, described meeting Keller in less glowing terms: "[She] made an unpleasant, even grim, impression on me. She appeared to be an affected, very temperamental and extremely spoilt girl. She talked about God and how God disapproved of revolution. In general, she reminded me of those blessed and holy nuns and 'pilgrim women' whom I have seen in our villages and convents."

This is an issue I studied pretty closely as the evolution of the human mind was my original interest. In practice, there is no clean separation between the biological and sociocultural stories.

No ape can learn proper fluid grammatical speech. They can only get as far as mastering several hundred signs. So their linguistic skills, even when brought up by humans, only reaches the indexical level of semiosis, not the properly syntactic. That means humans do have neurobiological adaptations that underwrite grammatical fluidity.

On the other hand, those evolutionary changes would have to be minor in structural terms. They would mostly concern a reorganised vocal tract - one, that like the human hand is designed for precision manipulation, is pre-adapted to syntactically-organised articulation. And then an expansion of the cortical pre-motor areas that would add the "top-downness" to fluidly control complex grammatical speech acts. Vocalisation in apes is centred instead on the "emotional" part of the cortex - the cingulate. That is the part of our brains that still shouts shit and fuck in fairly simple and inarticulate fashion.

Then feral children stories are confounded by the fact that brains in humans also have a prolonged sensitive period for getting familiar with the regularities of speech. It takes about seven years for those parts of their brains to myelinate. So a lack of exposure to speech during infancy becomes a permanent handicap. This is why feral children fail to learn speech when taken back into civilisation and the conclusion was that they were autistic. Which could also have been true.

So when it comes to a scientific answer, nature doesn't offer an easy clean-cut experiment. You can't have a simple before an after where you can demonstrate the impact of a chimp learning syntax, or even a naive human infant learning syntax at a later age, after the brain has lost most of the necesssary plasticity.

This creates a fertile ground for people to project their wishful thinking on.

However, the story became very clean-cut for me once the question is framed in terms of biosemiotics. The similarities between genes, neurons and words as syntactical codes, grammars of regulation, just leap out.

Having said that, there are some real puzzles about exactly how quickly Homo moved from being pre-linguistic to fully linguistic. It is striking that fire was being used 800,000 years ago. Likewise spears 400,000 years ago. And Australian aborigines showed boats of some kind were being used to island hop maybe 80,000 years ago. Yet fully symbolic culture only shows around 40,000 years ago. It remains a really interesting question how to map the evolution of completely modern speech to that reasonably lengthy cultural curve.

In short, the pace of change is too fast to be a matter of biological evolution, and also too slow from the sociocultural point of view.

Of course, climate and lifestyle may play a big part in nudging progress along. But we can speculate about a more indexical protolinguistic stage to bridge the gap. The early grammars may have had to luck into their modern simple subject-verb-object logical format. The final step could have been a stumble into that last abstracting, and indeed reductionist, linguistic habit.

the case of (pre-linguistic and pre-tamed) Helen Keller... — Pierre-Normand

I'd mention that Keller didn't lose her hearing and sight until she was two. So she started off with a normal development.

She also had a family language of sorts - some 60 signs. Shakes of the head meant yes or no, pushes and pulls meant go and come. Her father was mimed as putting on a pair of glasses, her mother by tying up hair. Ice cream was a shiver.

So the drama of her finger-spelling "awakening" was overplayed.

This culture isn't merely a possession but also a way of being; and the inhabiting of a symbolically mediated culture is a very specific way of being. — Pierre-Normand

A great way of putting it.

He describes his pre-linguistic past as him being stupid. — Harry Hindu

So your own cite says the difference was like night and day. And yet you want to shrug your shoulders and say there's no big deal. Language is just a more complex form of symbol system.

What I have denied is that you become self-aware, or conscious, after leraning language. — Harry Hindu

So are you saying animals aren’t conscious then? You can’t have it both ways.

No, it proves that he can refer to his self in the past, — Harry Hindu

But it is his post linguistic past which he refers to in that video segment. And I’ve already cited the telling way he describes his pre linguistic past.

The rest of your post doesn't reject anything I've said — Harry Hindu

I've shown that language ain't "just a tool" as you claim. If we are looking for something that explains the mental chasm between social animal and encultured human, then language accounts for that. If you can offer some alternative causal mechanism, go for it. If you believe that "complex thought" pre-exists language, where is the evidence for some radical neurobiological-level change?

If you go back and look at the video between about 14:00 and 18:00, you'll see that had ideas about himself and even goes about describing his gardening at a hospital and his relationship with his boss. — Harry Hindu

Yeah. After he learnt language. So proves my point.

Language is a tool. — Harry Hindu

I can see you are emotionally attached to your dismissive position. But think about it. Genes, neurons, words (and numbers) are all examples of something similar - syntactical machinery. A way to accumulate regulatory information in a hot and messy world.

So as "a tool", language wasn't any old tool. It was another of those epochal developments in the story of the evolution of life and mind. There is a good reason why humans suddenly became so explosively different from other large brained, highly social, animals.

Language makes more complex ideas communicable. — Harry Hindu

It makes that complexity possible as those ideas can now develop at a cultural level. There is a cultural-level means to accumulate them in an evolutionarily ratcheting fashion. We can inherit the memes of our grandparents, and indeed a thousand generations of our ancestors.

Why would you resist this obvious fact?

This still doesn't dissolve the distinction. It just redifines objective and subjective into adaptive points of view versus the world itself. — Marchesk

But I wasn't trying to dissolve the distinction necessarily. I was responding by trying to make the best sense of it in my lights.

So what I reacted to was @Sam26's simple acceptance of a dualistic ontology where the subjective would be "facts of the mind" and objective would be "facts of the world".

One part of my reply was that all facts are "facts of the mind". This is the semiotic view where "facts" are the signs that form our experiential Umwelt - the world as we construct it, and so the "world with us in it" as its interpreters.

So facticity is generally on the side of the "mental", or informational. And objective vs subjective simply become two opposing extremes of how we regard these facts or signs. We assign some experiences to our "self" as being highly personal, voluntary, variable, unsharable, etc. And other experiences as being "objective facts of the world" as they are highly invariant, recalcitrant, sharable, involuntary, etc.

On closer inspection, this isn't a very good distinction. Is the yellowness of the marigold a fact of the world or a fact of the mind? Is your yellow, my yellow? Why does physics say nothing is actually yellow and that it is all just some kind of information processing trick in your brain?

Semiosis cleans that up. Yellow is a sign that we construct to interpret the facts of the world. It doesn't represent the reality, but it does do the job of mediating an embodied modelling relation with the world as we then can act in a purpose-serving way which has predictable material consequences. I know when the banana is ripe enough eat just at a quick glance.

So that is part of the answer. Objective vs subjective is not that robust a dichotomy principally because it is the jargon favoured by the tradition of dualism and AP theories of truth. Bad philosophy. Semiotics says it is really just a way we categorise experience. We split facticity into that which is, overall, highly personal - "on the side of the controlling self" - and highly impersonal, or "on the side of the resisting world".

And then, the other part of the answer was about a general attempt to shift from a passive to an active understanding of "mind".

Dualism has its cultural force because people find it easy to think about mind as a kind of conscious substance. It is a psychic stuff that feels, thinks and senses. Semiotics paves the way for seeing mind as an action of interpretance, a constantly adapting modelling relation. Every moment of consciousness is some other possible state of attentional focus - some actualised point of view - quickly to be replaced by whatever viewpoint strikes the best adapted state in the next.

So there is no stuff that is conscious, as if consciousness were the property of a substance. There just is a flow of viewpoints that have a coherent past and an orientated future. This is what neuroscience tells us. It is how brains work. The emphasis is put on the relating rather than the existing, where it belongs in a process view.

This model of mindfulness as a semiotic process can then be applied to the subjective~objective distinction. At one extreme is the absolute locatedness of whatever it is that I'm experiencing at this place and moment in space and time. That is the subjective pole. Then at the other extreme would be what I - or any reasoning person - would believe to be the general case at the end of a process of exhaustive inquiry. The most disembodied view we could imagine arriving at - the one as if we stood outside everything. This is of course the Pragmatic theory of truth offered by CS Peirce. He defined objectivity in these terms.

So I was giving my grounds for rejecting the standard dualistic distinction of subjective vs objective, and offering the alternative triadic metaphysics of semiotics or the pragmatism of modelling relations.

Yeah. Anything to avoid admitting we need to do metaphysics when using metaphysical terms in our good old "everyday".

It means that words develop in everyday uses, and those uses can tell us much about what words/concepts mean. — Sam26

So a pair of technical terms are developed within metaphysical discourse. And instead of applying dichotomous rigour to clarify the intelligible basis of those terms, we should ... go listen to ordinary folk to see how they bumble about with them?

Sounds legit. :lol: