I’m tempted to say “It is what it is”. Again I have to ask what x = x means outside of mathematics.
No idea. It’s not something we’re capable of thinking about. But what about Schrödinger’s cat? Isn’t a superposition of states a violation of that principle?
None of those questions seem to illustrate that.
That’s just observation. You can of course say that any observation is a subjective experience, but I don’t see what is gained thereby. Your point remains opaque.
You should try saying what you mean and doing it clearly. So far, no real idea.
Does that mean it has to be true? If so, it isn’t an axiom, it’s a claim for which the world is evidence.
Does this have anything to do with axiomatic truths about the world, which was supposedly the topic?
That could be either ‘how do developing organisms gain consciousness’ or ‘how did conscious organisms first evolve ‘.
On consideration, both of these are wrong. Without Identity “True” might be “False”. This axiom is a definition or rule we must agree to a priori. As such it is neither true nor false. It is true that we must accept Identity for this statement to make sense.
The discussion had turned to basic assumptions, and it is very common for people to argue over a difference in assumptions. I infer an Axiom of Faith because people often argue as if this were a formal axiom (and to those folks I guess it is).
That said, we might have ranged off-topic just a bit. 
I think @John_Harshman’s reference to quantum superposition is apt here. I won’t suggest that it violates the law of non-contradiction. However, if we lived in a world where quantum phenomena constituted our usual, everyday experience, the law of non-contradiction may not seem axiomatically true as it now does to us. At the very least, it might not be taken as one of the core foundations of reasoning.
As I see it, in that case our brains would likely have evolved along a different pathway, one in which the laws of logic as we now understand them would not have arisen in quite the same form. We might, instead, have an intuition that represents the Schrodinger equation in some way.
What I also think you are misunderstanding, is that no one here seems to be suggesting that the laws of logic are not needed to practice science as we have historically practiced it. Rather, the issue at question is whether those axioms can be said to be true and, if so, by what means have we determined them to be true. Your position seems to be we know this thru something other than empirical evidence. However, the examples you give do rely on empirical evidence.
To my mind, those axioms are better understood as “properly basic beliefs”, beliefs which we hold to be true because they just seem to be true, but whose truth cannot be demonstrated. They can then serve as fundamental premises for other beliefs that can be demonstrated to be true, but only if the truth of the properly basic beliefs is first assumed.
I think you are on the right track here, but I suggest using “Necessary” rather than “True”. The Axiom of Identify is necessary to have any notion of true or false. Some axioms are necessary to a given statement, but others will not be necessary.
It’s not clear to me how a better understanding of consciousness helps answer or even shed light on any of these questions, other than the question of consciousness itself.
Though the sense I am getting from your response and elsewhere in the thread is you are seeking a definition of life that goes beyond the physical. That the idea of mind-body dualism permits a form of life beyond physical metabolism, growth, reproduction, responses to stimuli, etc.
And that ultimately this is coming back to satisfying existential fears around death, and the allowing for the possibility of life after death.
Is that a fair assessment?
I was thinking about how science should work while you’re saying that it does work like that. This made me realize that subjectivity has always been part of science, even though I was trying to add it in.
Every observation is a person having an experience. Without the observer, there’s no observation. A scientist’s thinking and interpretation are what make observation possible, and all of this is subjective. You can’t take the human observer out of science, and since you can’t remove the human, you can’t remove subjectivity.Trying to eliminate subjectivity would mean eliminating the observer—and without that, there’s no science.
This challenges the idea that science can be fully objective. Science aims to be objective through methods like peer review, hypothesis testing, and controlled experiments. These help reduce bias and bring agreement. But aiming for objectivity is different from starting with pure objectivity.
@LRT, again you are simply making vague assertions – nowhere near the level of specificity, let alone substantiation, required to evaluate your claims.
HOW do “subjective experiences” “when combined with objective knowledge” “contribute to a deeper understanding”? Give specifics.
Likewise HOW is “subjective exploration” “structured by objective accumulated knowledge”, and HOW does this prevent these insights from being tainted with “preconceptions, biases, etc, etc"? Give specifics.
I would not classify your temporary, anesthetic-induced ‘mis-sensation’ as a “subjective experience”, but rather as “emprical evidence”, which includes “evidence obtained through sense experience”, in the same way that I would classify phantom limb syndrome, dysesthesia, hallucinations, or the visual distortions I experienced having migraines as a teenager, as such. Such phenomena are often well-documented in medicine and neurology.
What you experienced is apparently known as “proprioceptive mislocalization”, and has an extensive body of literature associated with it (though how much of this is directly relevant to your own specific sense experiences, I don’t know).
Addendum: this paper might be relevant (but I don’t have access, beyond the abstract): Altered hand proprioception following regional anesthesia as a cause of traumatic jersey finger: Report of two cases
I would suggest that a single anecdote neither clarifies nor muddles our understanding. Such understanding would require a sufficient level of context that a single anecdote lacks. Such wider context would seem to be ubiquitously lacking in “subjective exploration”.
Perhaps this axiom is more about language than about the world. In math, it’s just part of the definition of the relation “=”.
No. It only means eliminating the possibility that what is being observed would not exist in the same state if the observer did not exist. At least according to some understandings of “objectivity.”
If someone is reading a thermometer that is known to be accurate, the temperature measurement that is obtained is objectively correct. It doesn’t matter that there is a human observer involved.
But is it at least hypothetically possible that we could have arrived at a body of knowledge just as detailed as the one we now have, without the law of identity as one of its foundations? That is to say, that particular axiom may only appear necessary because we have built almost everything we know on it. Pull it out of the structure and everything else collapses.
Primarily the second one.
We still do not know how matter turns into life is not a straw man, but a fact.
I’m continuing to read, but it’s been tough to find time with all the replies coming in.
You should pay more attention to what these notable exceptions have to say.
These questions were focused on the origins of life, not on consciousness or subjective-objective issues. There are too many different conversations happening simultaneously.
That subjectivity is part of the scientific process. As indicated in my most recent response to Faizal
Every observation is a person having an experience. Without the observer, there’s no observation. A scientist’s thinking and interpretation are what make observation possible, and all of this is subjective. You can’t take the human observer out of science, and since you can’t remove the human, you can’t remove subjectivity.Trying to eliminate subjectivity would mean eliminating the observer—and without that, there’s no science.
This challenges the idea that science can be fully objective. Science aims to be objective through methods like peer review, hypothesis testing, and controlled experiments. These help reduce bias and bring agreement. But aiming for objectivity is different from starting with pure objectivity.
Please elaborate.
No time to look into this today (getting ready for a trip) but I’m pretty sure that excluding (or weakening) Identity puts a strong limits on the sort of reasoning allowed. It might not be total chaos, but the set of provable proposition would be considerably smaller.
Please stop. I wrote:
So, is the field continuing to advance or not? Have we reached your claimed “limit of objectivity”?
I don’t see any suggestion of any limit to objectivity. Do you?
The temporary, anesthetic-induced ‘mis-sensation’ is a subjective experience that can be converted into empirical evidence—this is the point I was trying to make.
To clarify, I’m not suggesting that there’s any mystery or that it was an extraordinarily rare occurrence. Nor am I claiming it wasn’t a physical phenomenon (it was). What I am arguing is that the sense perception involved in experiencing dysesthesia, hallucinations, and proprioceptive mislocalization constitutes a subjective experience that can be transformed into empirical evidence. This illustrates that science, while rooted in objectivity, does involve a degree of subjectivity, which is then quantified for study.