Obama: Truth is What You Can Get Away With

Yesterday we spoke of Obama's troubled relationship with truth -- not that he's troubled, mind you. Rather, his casual acquaintance with truth -- and therefore reality -- results in troubles for us, Obama's "folks" (not to be confused with his volk, the true beneficiary of his collectivist lies).

For someone with a normal devotion to truth, it is difficult to comprehend the person who doesn't share this spontaneous allegiance to what transcends us -- just as it is impossible for good people to truly understand what motivates the evil.

Truth is disinterested, which is one major reason why, say, a pathologically narcissistic president may reject it, since the fragile self-image of the narcissist is of no concern to truth. Truth is for its own sake. It hurts, but only if one has an abiding interest in falsehood. Otherwise, it usually doesn't hurt at all. Rather, it feels quite pleasant. At least if you value freedom, which most Americans admittedly do not.

Without a doubt, truth is one of the names of God -- as is beauty, or love, or goodness, or creativity, or freedom. The existence of these celestial attractors creates a vertical space between us and them, which is essentially where we live and move and have our being -- or better, our becoming.

Hart agrees that "our experience of reality does in fact have a transcendental structure," and that the transcendent pole of our becoming provides "an absolute orientation for thought."

Just as there is a visual horizon at the edge of things, there is a "horizon of being... toward which the mind is always turned and against which every finite object is set off" within "the great middle distance of the phenomenal world" (ibid.).

This is what the Raccoon knows of as the expansive horizon of subjectivity, for there is no proper human subject in the absence of this horizon. But importantly, reality doesn't "end" at the horizon. Rather, this horizon expands infinitely, based upon the metabolism of experience.

For this reason, one person lives within a vast and unlimited metacosmic space, while another subsists between cramped and parochial horizons defined at one end by the matrix media and the other by state-run edudoctrination. Human appetite takes care of the rest -- that is, human desire untethered to any transcendent concerns, from the mind's proper objects. They call it "sophistication," but as Fred Reed writes, it is "the sophistication that comes of growing up in a whorehouse."

That kind of debased sophistication forecloses the real kind -- i.e., refinement, sublimation, transfiguration, etc. I mean, bathing "in civilization’s bilges" (Reed) doesn't actually result in cleanliness.

Hart describes our cosmic situation: "the gaze of the apperceptive 'I' within is turned toward a transcendental 'that' forever beyond; and mental experience, of the self or of the world outside the self, takes shape in the relation between these two 'supernatural' poles."

Exactly. Although it may appear as if the world merely makes an imprint on the mind, like a seal into wax, "we approach nature only across the interval of the supernatural," i.e., the dynamic space between us and O. We are always dependent "upon a dimension of reality found nowhere within the physical order." "The mind stretches out and toward and prospectively takes hold of an ultimate 'object,'" and "only in that way interprets and judges the world."

Back to our troublesome president and his infrahuman (or all too human, depending upon whether one sees the ass as only half-full of himself) relation with truth. When our pneumatic space shrinks, the world is horizontalized, resulting in the conflation of truth and desire (since desire is deprived of its transcendent object). Therefore, "truth" devolves to what I want to be true, e.g., the workability of socialized medicine.

Only something transcendentally disinterested within ourselves compels us "to accept an unwelcome truth, not because it pleases or attracts us, but because we are driven by a deeper devotion to truth as such" (Hart). Here again, proper human devotion belongs to transcendent truth as such, not to some fashionable idol of the tenured.

But Obama is a morally retarded child of Machiavelli, who seems to have invented the notion of "effectual truth," whereby "the truth of words is in the result they produce..."

Nor should the prince of darkness worry about "justice" (another star in the celestial horizon), but simply act, "and the words to justify your action will come to you afterward.” The prince must have faith that Queen Valerie will come up with something.

Thus, "In recent weeks the world has woken up to the fact that President Obama is one of the most committed disciples of effectual truth telling in recent history. Time and again, when confronted by political necessity, he and his administration have told falsehoods in order to achieve their objectives" (Continetti).

But has the world really woken up to the fact that effectual truth is the only truth the left knows? It pains me to say -- for in this instance the truth hurts -- no way.

Most Transparent Cosmos Ever

This may or may not be the best of all possible worlds, but it's certainly the most transparent. "Transparency," of course, is a metaphor borrowed from the world of sight.

Or is it? For how else to characterize a world that is never merely its appearance, but rather, always reveals inexhaustible depths of intelligibility? This intelligibility permeates existence like light streaming through a window -- the window being us.

To put it another way, if the cosmos were simply its appearance, this would equate to an utterly meaningless existence. That reality is not appearance -- even while appearance is reality -- is the starting point for the Adventure of Consciousness.

Both believers and unbelievers have faith in this ultimate transparency, at least in the West. In Islam, Allah's motives are obscure and unknowable, resulting in a cosmos that is equally arbitrary and unintelligible. There is a reason science did not, and could not have, developed there, for the very possibility of science rests upon correct metaphysical assumptions.

Now that I think about it, religion may be thought of as concrete metaphysics, just as metaphysics may be thought of as abstract religion. And not all religions are equal, for if they were, it would amount to the belief that truth isn't One and that reality is whatever we want it to be.

But reality is what it is. Which is what? Well, if we begin by not arbitrarily excluding one pole of reality, there are subjects and objects, or interior and exterior, or being and knowing, or world and spirit; or let us just say (a la Voegelin) a single process of reality becoming luminous -- i.e., transparent -- to itself. You can never get beneath or beyond this inclusive description, because this is What is Happening, period.

In The Experience of Being, Hart writes that "The human striving to know the truth of things, as far as possible and in every sphere, is sustained by a tacit faith in some kind of ultimate coincidence or convertibility between being and consciousness."

Now, this is a Remarkable Fact, probably the most important Fact there is, because it is the Fact that makes all other facts possible -- even facts that deny the Fact! That is, for human beings,

"There is a natural orientation of the mind toward a horizon of total intelligibility -- a natural intellectual appetite for immediate knowledge of what is -- that requires us to venture our time, our hopes, our labors, and our contentions on the assumption that rational thought and coherent order are two sides of a single reality..." (ibid.).

Now, any tenured yahoo can verbally deny this link between mind and world, intelligence and intelligibility, but no one can live by such a belief, unless he is surrounded by caretakers and conservators -- or, in Obama's case, if he is shielded from reality by the Matrix Media.

Self-delusion cannot maintain itself in the absence of a whole system of reward for compliance, pressure to conform, and self-soothing (and/or -aggrandizing) fairy tales. Auto-pullwoolery doesn't work unless an awful lot of people are pulling on the same blanket.

Now, to remove the blanket is to turn around in Plato's Mancave and peer outside the Matrix. In so doing, we see that "there is a wonderful transparency of the world to thought, and a wonderful power of thought to interpret reality coherently through forms and principles that are of an entirely noetic nature." For this reason, "no scientist imagines that... reality will turn out to be essentially irrational" (ibid.).

At the end of the deity, we don't have to conquer nature, for doing so is like smashing through a door that is wide open. We are open to the world, just as the world is open to us, in a two-way flow of being. Thus, "The world yields itself to our abstractions, and we cannot help but work upon the assumption that it always will precisely because being itself is pure intelligibility" (ibid.).

Always? Yes, always. Just as we will never run out of poems or songs, the cosmos will never exhaust its intelligibility.

Unless.

Unless what?

Unless the left or some other materialist metaphysic prevails. Since progressives already have the answer, they effectively divorce themselves from the living process of reality.

Exaggeration? Well, just ask yourself: what is Obama learning from the reality of Obamacare? Correct: he is learning nothing, except perhaps how to burrow more deeply into his lower intestine. As it so happens, we are also learning nothing, but for entirely different reasons.

That is, when government-run healthcare was but a dream of Obama's deadbeat father, we knew this dream did not comport with reality. Therefore, one side -- dream or reality -- must go. So Obama's still got his comforting and indestructable dream of iron, while we're stuck with the nightmare and the bill.

[T]he very search for truth is implicitly a search for God... --The Experience of Being

Who Let the I AM In?

Consciousness itself is a mystery; but that it should be so simple, so unified, and yet, dependent upon -- or inclusive of -- so many billions of macro- and micro-processes, is even stranger.

Truly, human subjectivity is either the ultimate or penultimate case of E Pluribus Unum, depending upon whether or not one believes in God. But if one doesn't believe in God, then our self-evident I AM goes from intriguing mystery to annoying impossibility.

Yes, one could say that, just as there can be no inside in the absence of an outside, there can be no object without a subject. The two are complementary. In other words, a thing must have a kind of interior prehension in order to be a thing at all -- otherwise, it's just an indistinct blob. So existence as such implies interiority, because to exist is to exist as an intelligible thing or unit.

Any form of life represents conscious interiority, a bounded area of awareness. But in the case of human beings, this interiority is not just a vague and diffuse, preconscious apprehension of interior wholeness. Rather, it is a highly focused ingathering of interiority that we all fondly refer to as I.

As we've discussed in previous posts, it is as if both the general evolution and individual development of consciousness represent a conquest of dimensionality. This movement is precisely what confers meaning upon time. Otherwise, time is just abstract duration. Watch a child grow (outside and in) and you will intuit time's substance.

The consciousness of, say, a snail, is of surfaces only. Thus, it exists in a kind of quasi-timeless two-dimensional space: forward, toward what facilitates life, and backward, away from what doesn't.

But anyone with a dog or cat can "see" that they live in a more expansive space. For example, they listen for and interpret far off sounds, and are at the center of a rich olfactory matrix we can scarcely imagine. But more importantly, they are tuned into their human masters, which itself expands the intersubjective space in which they live and move.

Now think about the hyperdimensional space in which human beings live. It includes not only our personal past, but the past of the entire species, depending upon how much history one knows. It extends outward, to the farthest horizon of the celestial lightstream, and backward, to the very genesis of this whole cosmic affair. It reaches into humans and other animals via empathy, and deep into oneself via introspection. And some say it can extend so far -- via mystical experience -- that it may know the cosmic Subject, the great I AM from which our own little spark of interiority is derived.

Until hitting page 197 of The Experience of God, I thought I was alone in the bewilderness on this subject. Alert readers will recall a passage on p. 49 of The Book for which the blog is named, where it is written:

"Without the principle of wholeness woven into the very fabric of the universe, it would be impossible for true wholeness to later emerge at the levels of life and mind. The integrated wholeness we see in a living organism discloses a fundamental principle that is absolutely intrinsic to the universe."

Likewise -- and here's the important part -- the transcendental unity of our own subjectivity, "the ordered whole we all effortlessly refer to as 'I,' is another accurate intuition of the wholeness of nature." In the absence of this principle, "there is simply no explanation as to how the billions of individual cellular processes taking place in your brain and body so neatly resolve themselves into the simple, transcendent and unitive experience called 'I.'"

Multi-undisciplinarian that I am, I have a tendency to make a point and quickly move on. It's not just that I get bored easily, but that the Adventure of Consciousness must continue on, in, and up. No looking back!

But Hart spends a few pages expanding upon this notion of the unity of consciousness, agreeing that it ultimately converges upon -- I would say returns to -- God.

"Consciousness is, in its subjectivity, one and indivisible," writes Hart. Yes, there is diversity -- even inconceivable diversity -- "but in order for there to be such a thing as representation, or reason, or conceptual connections, or coherent experience, or subjectivity, or even the experience of confusion, there must be a single unified presence of consciousness to itself, a single point of perspective that is, so to speak, a vanishing point, without extension or parts, subsisting in its own simplicity."

I would modify this somewhat, in that what we discover at this vanishing point is not so much an abstract being but a concrete activity -- an irreducible experience in becoming. In my view, human consciousness is, so to speak, the metabolism of experience. We cannot possibly stop experiences from occurring -- i.e., we cannot stop time -- so it is our unending task to weave this ceaseless flow of experience into our psychic substance, forging ever greater wholeness and unity.

Hart implies something similar, for example, vis-a-vis left and right brain activity. The existence of differing modes of consciousness in the two cerebral hemispheres does not imply that we are somehow inhabited by two different subjects. Rather, what we experience is "a single consciousness" that attempts "to integrate the experiences and behaviors that each hemisphere makes possible."

Indeed, just as the existence of two eyes with slightly different perspectives facilitates the perception of depth, the integration of our "two hemispheres" (and there are more than just two such perspectives) results in a much richer and deeper psychic space.

There are always going to be "discontinuities" in consciousness, or semi-autonomous areas which are poorly integrated into the whole. At a certain point these become mind parasites, but in general, most any form of psychopathology can be understood as a failure of integration.

For example, one person fails to integrate his childhood experience via denial and repression, while another fails to integrate, say, sexual appetite into the human subject. Instead, it exists as a kind of impersonal animal instinct, unconnected to any higher striving or purpose. You might say that it is reduced from a hyperdimensional modality to a two-dimensional one. Or, it falls from a sacrament to a mere genetic whip.

So, what have we learned? For Hart, "Only the 'vanishing point' of a subjective perspective allows the diversity of reality to appear to the mind as a unified phenomenon, to which consciousness can attend."

I would only add the caveat that it doesn't end there. Rather, each end is a fresh new beginning -- or an annoying rendezvous with time, if you allow it to be.

But in any event, "there is no good reason not to accord serious consideration to the ancient intuition that the true order of ultimate causes is precisely the opposite of what the materialist philosopher imagines it is, and that the material realm is ultimately dependent upon mind rather than the reverse..."

Or, just say that I is prior to AM, but that, like God, our I never stops its AMing.

Nonsense and Sensibility

We all recognize that the physical world "obeys" various laws.

But as in the Matrix, some laws can be bent, others broken. It is assumed by materialists that no laws are broken -- or even bent -- with the appearance of Life. Can this possibly be true? Or does biology reveal its own laws that are just as intrinsic -- and universal -- as the laws of physics?

It is also assumed that no physical laws are transgressed with the emergence of humanness. Here they are on even shakier ground, because in the effort to close the materialist bruteloop, they end up unexplaining both their theory and themselves -- or just say truth and subjectivity. But a theory that denies truth and subjectivity is what and where, exactly?

Is it possible that, as with Life, Mind has its own logic and its own laws? Any theory of "natural law" would so imply. Of course, these laws do not negate the physical or biological, but it is difficult -- okay, impossible -- to avoid the conclusion that they transcend them.

I frankly don't give these matters a great deal of thought. Rather, I either stumble upon something that resonates Deep Within and makes Total Sense to me and then forget about the rest, or I am struck by some sort of spontaneous Interior Revelation that is accompanied by a Sense of Certainty, at least in so far as I am concerned.

That is to say, I have a number of beliefs that could not be any different than they are unless I were fundamentally different than I am. In other words, in order to believe certain things, I would have to be a different person. You know -- sensibility. If you share the same sensibility, it's difficult not to have many of the same beliefs. In this regard, it seems that the sensibility is prior to the specific beliefs, for which reason it is difficult to embrace a belief that fundamentally clashes with one's sensibility.

Speaking of which, I'm sure this principle accounts for a great deal of political... friction. I personally know people who, even now, maintain unswerving devotion to Obama and to liberalism more generally. It seems that nothing -- nothing in the real world -- can cause them to deviate from this beautiful abstraction called liberalism.

Why? Sensibility. Much if not most of this sensibility revolves around Conservatives are Evil, so it is very much fear-based. A liberal is always terrified of something, especially if it doesn't exist, or it is totally disproportionate to the fear it provokes, e.g., global warming, racism, homophobia, the Patriarchy, the Tea Party, Fox News, Christianity, etc.

Which is another important point. In both Proverbs and Psalms it is said that wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord. Now, there are many ways to interpret this wisecrack without assuming that God is a Scary and Punitive Monster. For example, we could simply begin with the truism that man is afraid. Of course he is! Upon discovering this fear -- which essentially comes with self-awareness, or awareness of separation -- what should we do with it? Where should its focus be placed?

To turn it around, the leftist has the same fear as any other human, except he denies God. Therefore, where does the fear go? It goes everywhere. This is a variation of Chesterton's observation that people who don't believe in God don't believe in nothing, but rather, anything.

Just so, liberals have no fear of God. But does this translate to being unafraid? Hardly! Indeed, the whole project of liberalism involves the creation of a godlike state to take away The Fear. (Ironically, Obama wishes to put the fear of God into us, but he's really just talking about being terrified of normal Americans.)

But with the undeniable reality of Obamacare, even reliable LoFo Democrats are beginning to fear the state. When this happens, panic will set in, which essentially means that the Fear has become uncontained. The purpose of myth (in the vulgar sense) is to contain the fear, so the unraveling of the myth results in a recrudescence of primordial terror, the Nameless Dread.

Speaking of law, not to go all Godwin on you this early in the morning, but this is precisely what happened with 1930s Germany. Fear became uncontained -- their national myth completely unraveled -- creating a vacuum for the Nazi myth to fill. This myth provided a clear focus for the fear; ironically, wisdom began with fear of the Jews. (This guy explains it well: "Some people turn to God in their hour of need, I turned to Adolf Hitler” (HT American Digest).

Back to this notion of religious sensibility. I'll give an example. I am currently reading a book by Hartshorne called Philosophers Speak of God. On the one hand, I am learning all sorts of "new" things. But on the other, it is like reading my own mind, or "remembering" what I truly believe. Hartshorne is simply explicating things I implicitly know, in a lucid and compelling way that I cannot deny, because this is Who I Am.

Now, I don't mention this for purposes of sensational autobobography. Rather, I think we're talking about something universal which must be particularized in the individual. Being an individual means being this person and not that. But where does the individual leave off and the universal begin? For if there are no universals, then we are condemned to a corrosive relativism and chronic doubt.

In The Experience of God, Hart provides a partial list of the things human beings universally encounter upon entering the human state, and which simply cannot be explained with recourse to any materialist metaphysic. These include the qualitative dimension of experience, abstract concepts, reason, the transcendental conditions of experience, intentionality, and the unity of consciousness.

It seems that the qualitative dimension of experience would be most relevant to the question of sensibility, for this is ultimately the "irreducibly subjective feeling of 'what it is like' to experience something," the "inalienable dimension of personal awareness, without which there could be no private experience and no personal identity at all" (Hart).

Obviously, personal identity has nothing to do with the world of quantity. Rather, it is a world of pure quality. But how do qualities get into the cosmos to begin with? Do we actually discover them? Or are we simply trapped (a la Kant) in the echo chamber of our own neurology?

If that is the case, then mind and world are utterly divorced from one another, with no possibility of reconciliation, or even civil discourse. Hence the undisguised hostility of the atheist crowd toward any transcendental experience(r).

In reality, not only does man enter an impossibly rich world of qualities upon becoming man, but "these seem to exist in excess of all the objectively detectable physical processes with which they are associated"; they "differ from one another far more radically than any one neuronal event differs from any other." I mean, you've seen one neuronal event, you've seen them all. Like the digital code of a computer, there are only two possibilities, on or off. But look at the unimaginably complex world to which this gives rise!

The problem is that everyone knows a computer is programmed, so it is not as if digital bits spontaneously cohere and evolve into the program. But the materialist/mechanistic metaphysic insists "that only the quantitative physical properties of the world are really real" (ibid.).

But note what they are doing: they begin with the experience of reality, as we all must (where else to begin?). But they then distill an idealized abstraction -- devoid of qualities -- from the far richer world as experienced, and proceed to concretize the abstraction -- which is what Whitehead referred to as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Once you have swallowed that fallacious Blue Pill, you have chosen to stay in materialist matrix, with no exit. Conversely, religion is -- or should be -- the Red Pill, the way out of the materialist/leftist/tenured/mass media matrix.

The other property I'd like to discuss is intentionality, which refers to the fact that consciousness is always "about" something. In other words, it always refers to something outside or beyond itself, which, when you think about it, poses grave problems for any materialist metaphysic. For how can matter be "about" anything? Rather, it just is.

But humanness is absolutely suffused with this Aboutness, and on every level. For example, our intrinsic intersubjectivity means that human beings are inherently about others, just as others are about us.

Hart doesn't get into this, but in my opinion, this must follow the Aboutness of God, or, more specifically, the Trinity. For what is the Father about? The Son. And what is the Son about? The Father. And what are they about? The Holy Spirit.

It reminds me of what the adolescent Jesus said when his anxious parents found him running circles around the elders: "Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?"

To be continued...

All Cretans are Liars, Ergo All Materialists are Cretins

Some people say -- and they are no doubt correct -- that creation doesn't begin with the so-called Big Bang of ±13.7 billion years ago.

Rather, this here cosmos is simply an instance of the more general principle of Creativity as such. Otherwise one is in the untenable position of arguing that creativity somehow begins with this particular creation, or that time has a "beginning," or that it is possible for "nothing" to exist -- existence and nothing being antithetical terms.

Philosophers have always wondered whether the cosmos has always been here, or whether it had a beginning. Physicists are in near universal agreement that it did indeed have a beginning, but that hardly means that Being can have a beginning. Or an end, for that matter. Rather, this existence of ours is grounded in Being as such.

Or is it? In my opinion, Being is simply an abstraction, in fact, the most abstract abstraction there could be. As such, it is void of meaningful content, for to say that it is "everything" is no more helpful than saying it is nothing. For if Being is everything then everything is Being, and we're just circling around a giant tautology. Or, to paraphrase Hartshorne, the assertion of pure Being is an instance of cognitive idling, a vacuous placeholder.

I don't care what anyone says, from Deepak to the Dalai Lama, but no one can "experience being." Yes, you will someday possess being -- for your terrestrial becoming will end -- but you will be dead and therefore not here to experience it, at least in this body. As far as one's earthly career is concerned, to die is to fully be what you are -- or were -- and nothing more.

What we can experience is becoming, for every instance of being is simply an abstraction from the wider and more inclusive category of becoming. To "experience" anything is to be extended in time, no matter what semantic tricks are deployed in order to deny its oneway passage.

In my view, creativity is the penultimate category, which means that time is truly "of the essence." And the ultimate category is Love, which means that "otherness" too is intrinsic. I frankly don't see how Christianity can be understood in any other terms, at least in an intellectually consistent manner.

Yes, there is still an Absolute. Except that the category "Person" is not -- nor could it be -- derived from it. Rather, the Absolute is posterior to Person(s). Or, we could say that the Absolute -- surprise! -- turns out to be Trinity, definitely not the simple monadic One of, say, Islam (nor the simplistic material one of scientism).

I'd like to continue our trialogue with Hart's The Experience of God, but see if it is possible to reconcile his traditional views with the more process-oriented view sketched out above.

Now, since creative becoming is our standard, we are no longer confronted with inexplicable and insurmountable discontinuities in the cosmos, beginning with the Big Bang. We don't have to wonder how it is possible for a dead universe to one day magically come to life, or how it produces self-conscious beings, or how these beings can know the "whole" of things -- as if the cosmos is in us rather than vice versa (it's actually both).

In this view, the "big bang" of Life is no less astonishing than the Big Bang of cosmology, and the big bang of human consciousness is even bigger than the first two. In fact, in the absence of the latter we wouldn't even know of the first two, so it would be as if they had never occurred.

In contrast to radical environmentalists who regard man as a cancer on the planet, not only do I not care about an earth without human inhabitants, I don't even care about a cosmos devoid of human life. You can have it. I don't want it. (Nor, for that matter, do I believe God would have much interest in such a sterile cosmos. Rather, be fruitful and multiply, please, just like your Creator.)

Hart addresses this outward discontinuity of the cosmos, asking how it is possible for "the aimlessness of matter" to achieve "so intense and intricate a concentration of its various random forces that, all at once, it is fantastically inverted into the virtual opposite of everything modern orthodoxy tells us matter is?"

I'll tell you how: Life is not an "inversion" of reality, but rather, a revelation of reality. Again, the ultimate categories are Love and Creativity, not matter and motion. If the latter two are the ultimate categories, then it is indeed the case that Life has no explanation beyond pure magic and miracle -- an inexplicable violation of everything we thought we knew about the cosmos. But that's not science, rather, just scientistic superstition. (And from there it is but a step to the black Magic of Government!)

Likewise, how is it that "matter can produce subjective awareness," and how could "abstract processes of reasoning or deliberation... possibly correspond with sequences of purely physical processes in the brain"?

Hmm? Same answer: the truth is at the top, not bottom, of the cosmos. In fact, to seek truth at the bottom -- or to attempt to reduce all truth to bottom-level truth -- is strictly insane.

Either the existence of human beings tells us something important about the cosmos, or it doesn't. Materialists try to have their crock and eat it too, by insisting that human beings are of no consequence, and yet, can reliably know the secret of existence. It's really an instance of the "all Cretans are liars" paradox, except that in this case all materialists are cretins whose puerile philosophy renders them unworthy of being believed.

Nevertheless, taken to its logical endpoint, materialism redounds to the ideal (!) of speaking "solely in terms of discrete physical processes and material elements, 'eliminating' all pre-scientific allusions to persons and mental events entirely.... Such a description, once it is perfected [!], will supposedly do away with the problem of consciousness because it will have done away with consciousness itself."

Oh good. Does this mean that man will no longer have problems? If so, then to quote Nilsson,

If you never had a problem, well everyone would be happy / But if everyone was happy, there'd never be a love song.

How sad. But for Hart, "The first-person perspective is not dissoluble into a third-person narrative of reality."

Ah ha! Now we're getting somewhere. For who is this First Person, this metacosmic subject? Why, it's old I AM. And I AM can never be reduced to IT IS. Rather IT IS is nestled in the creative womb of I AM -- or perhaps in the free and playful space between I AM and YOU ARE.