Universal Synesthesia

Awareness of Awareness What we define as the subjective consciousness cannot exist without the mechanism of self-reference. As mentioned before, human society cannot function the way it does without the abstract conceptualization that is the ego. Our ego is essentially the mental conception we have about ourselves, although most of the time, only the conscious aspects of the ego are apparent to the person who is self-reflecting. Aspects that have immediate relevance to your character in society, for example, most people tend to finish the sentence "I am" with their occupation or profession. The resulting consequence is people who are inherently superficial and frankly, basic in nature. It's not entirely our fault though, peering through the veil of the subconscious mind and discovering your true identity is no easy task, as the ramblings above suggest. Even if it is inherently flawed, part of what makes us sentient beings is our ability to be aware of our own actions and behaviour. We are constantly in a state of self-reference. Everything that we sense and think about is put into our subjective frame of reference, both emotionally and literally. When observing a beautiful evergreen tree in the wilderness, we characterize this organism based on what we think about ourselves. "This tree is huge!" is an automatic cognitive response that would signify that the tree's size was very large in comparison to your own physical stature, when ascertaining a defining quality of an external object, we are always the starting reference point. This is of course, is the only logical approach considering that nothing can be observed without a subjective entity doing the observing. All things around us are characterized by our own subjective analysis, and the mechanisms of perception that we utilize to make these labels and mental constructs are based on our perception of ourselves. In more cryptic terms, our perception of reality is but a subconscious reflection of our ego. Well to what extent would our emotional bias' interfere with a rational analysis of whatever we are experiencing? Notice that when describing the hypothetical evergreen, I stated that it was beautiful, well not everyone may agree with me on that. This discrepancy in emotional perception that distinguishes us from one another can prove to be both beneficial and detrimental to our progression as a species. On the one hand, multiple opinions stemming from multiple different contextual perceptions will provide much-needed diversity in the approaches to forming solutions to problems. On the other hand, different emotional biases can spark major conflicts. To resolve the issue, science has adopted a purely logical and separated approach to analyzing nature. This logical inference is purely objective and has no room for emotions and sensitivities; mathematical and scientific fields are founded on logical reasoning because they symbolize processes and events that are not up to debate. Although, there are a variety of instances in cognitive and material sciences alike in which there is an almost perfect 50/50 disagreement on an interpretation of a scientific phenomenon. The facts and data are all there, but it is the meaning being extrapolated from the data that is being disagreed on as humans with unique socio-cultural contexts and perceptions. Complex and seemingly paradoxical conundrums can be interpreted through multiple abstract ways, with no definite objectifiable answer. Whenever a field-defining problem that sparks this mass disagreement on semantic interpretation arises, it almost always has to do with the self-referential nature of the said problem. We will call these "hard problems" because the famous hard problem of consciousness is widely known as the problem we have with explaining why and how qualitative experiences are emergent from quantitative processes.