Dear Conrad,
Thank you for your considered and very thoughtful reply! Excellent to meet you.
As you state, and I agree, there is no inherent contradiction between 'consciousness', as always regarded in terms of a 1st-person viewpoint uniquely located in space and time (and possibility), and a 3rd-person 'objective mode' of imagining the world.
I particularly liked that you use the term 'objective' rather than 'exists' in your post. To my mind, those terms have distinct meanings, and are to be used syntactically in different ways (There are notes explaining this difference somewhere in the into of the http://uvsm.com website).
I also agree that the question "how does a 1st person experience arise from purely 3rd person reality?" confounds these two very different things: that the notion of existence is derived from the notion of 'objectively real' and *not* the other way around. Partly, that was the intent of the essay, to setup to clarify things like that, though in 25Ksc, including end-notes, there is only so much I can attempt to accomplish.
And you are also right about the 'prevailing intellectual background'. For example, the opposite question: "how does a pure 3rd person reality arise from a 1st person experience?", would suggest that I am some sort of philosophical idealist, and yet that is definitely *not* so! This is not a case of excluded middle. There is a third option, and it is much easier to work with.
The other alternative? Consider the notion of interaction, as a kind of 'information transit', as being maximally, simple, basic, fundamental, etc, and it becomes possible to construct all modes of view. For example, a 3rd person view is modeled very well with mathematics, as the study of relations, ie, a timeless analogue of 'interaction'. The 1st person view is to consider 'information transit' as directly equivalent to the notion of 'observed causality' -- which is more naturally considered as being inherently temporal.
This still leaves open the questions of domain embedding, but at least that is a lot more tractable than getting lost in a semantic quagmire, and thus, asking all the wrong questions, or in the wrong way. The world has enough distractions as it is to be adding yet more.
I very much liked your clarity about this: "No conceivable description of objective reality - that is, of reality as conceived from no particular point of view (3rd person) - could give a good account of the world from a particular point of view inside it". Yes, agreed, and well stated!
Also, moreover, that having a particular viewpoint, ie, locality in space, time, and possibility, is not specifically about conscious beings, brains, etc. This is a key point. It is important that the notion of locality (in time/space/possibility) be bound to the notion of the specificity of a particular actual interaction, as an instance of a causal relation bearing at least a little bit of *new* information, rather than to the (incorrectly presumed) absolute totalizing class of 'all possible interactions' (ie, with *no* additional information).
Any measuring device -- as a gathering of otherwise unknown information -- only has access to the world in a particular place and moment. All other information -- in the absolute elsewhere, in terms of time/space/possibility -- is inherently *unknowable*. Agreed that to conflate the prior uncertainty of measurement outcome, signaling process, etc, as intrinsically "conscious", is to conflate very different scales of complexity -- so much so that is is more readily a consideration of two separate domains altogether. There is no prior certainty at all that the domain embedding is "perfect".
Agreed "... it does not make sense to treat 1st person 'consciousness' as it if were some kind of 3rd person characteristic, that some entities objectively 'have' and others don't". This is also part of the reason why a clear distinction between the concepts and linguistic usage of 'to exist', 'to be real', and 'objective' is so important. These three concepts may be inseparable, and insofar as they are also distinct, they are not interchangeable.
We can sum up by saying that 'subjectivity' is not 'objectivity' (nor the reverse either), and both subjectivity and objectivity are not 'the real'. Real refers to the interaction between the subjective and the objective. Technically speaking, subjective and objective are not real, and do not "exist". The notion of "real" is in its own ontological class, apart from that which is related by it, 'the subjective' and 'the objective'.
I will take a look at the essays you reference.
Forrest