Subjective IS Objective
I'll admit that having a distinction between things which happen with intent and without intent is useful - so long as it doesn't try to become more than that. The subjective/objective distinction is false as soon as one tries to use it for something other than a distinction of the pertinent causal location of an event or a distinction between conscious experience versus a description of a thing. A simple metaphor will reveal the problem:
Nevada is a subset of The Earth. Something which happens in Nevada necessarily happens on Earth. One could make a Nevada/non-Nevada distinction and claim that any event must fall into one of those buckets. One can't claim that something which happens in Nevada doesn't happen on Earth because the one contains the other.
Agents are a subset of the universe so anything which happens in an agent happens in the universe. Anything which happens in the universe can hypothetically be described. Moreover, any subjective statement can have a corresponding objective statement which has the same meaning so long as one is trying to constrain expectation. "I like ice cream" can be converted to "Justin likes ice cream" and the same predictions can be made of my behavior whether you heard either of those statements from me. The hard problem of consciousness is irrelevant so long as experience always supervenes on observable physiological states. "I'm seeing red" can be reduced to "Justin's visual cortex is firing in a pattern which indicates a red experience." The same predictions can be made from either, so they can be said, by that standard, to mean the same thing.
Nevada is a subset of The Earth. Something which happens in Nevada necessarily happens on Earth. One could make a Nevada/non-Nevada distinction and claim that any event must fall into one of those buckets. One can't claim that something which happens in Nevada doesn't happen on Earth because the one contains the other.
Agents are a subset of the universe so anything which happens in an agent happens in the universe. Anything which happens in the universe can hypothetically be described. Moreover, any subjective statement can have a corresponding objective statement which has the same meaning so long as one is trying to constrain expectation. "I like ice cream" can be converted to "Justin likes ice cream" and the same predictions can be made of my behavior whether you heard either of those statements from me. The hard problem of consciousness is irrelevant so long as experience always supervenes on observable physiological states. "I'm seeing red" can be reduced to "Justin's visual cortex is firing in a pattern which indicates a red experience." The same predictions can be made from either, so they can be said, by that standard, to mean the same thing.
