@Laura I'm not sure if I can follow you there - maybe my view on the emergence of "subjectivity as the result of an inside-outside relation" is too technical (e.g., Nick Lane's theories, see talk below), too much subject to information theory (bio-semiotics) or too much general systems theory, e.g., Rosennean (M,R)-systems.
Feel free to share your paper, though :-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBiIDwBOqQA
@Laura I don't know if there is really a starting point that's accessible to us. My personal starting point is "life". We can only speculate how it came about but anything that's alive has at least the relation of "umwelt" and "innenwelt" (to use von Uexküll's words), or also it's "closed to effective causation" (in Robert Rosen's words). Both approaches are relational.
It's a long way from bacteria to sentient beings, but the above is fundamental. From here on it gets interesting.
@Laura I don't believe that such a thing, an unrelated subject, can exist. I'm referring to Charles Hartshorne's "process theology".
@Laura I agree that we can reason, build theories, about relations that shape our reality or that of others. The sciences of sociology, education, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, politics, defense, history, but also art and meditation practices provide frameworks of thought that can be developed analytically. As such we're still in the loop but not as subjects but as designers of relational models of objects.
Is such analysis independent of these relations? It depends on system boundaries.
@Laura It fits nicely. We're a social species. That is a source of transcendence for inter-subjectivity. We also have that knack for symbols *and* narratives, but on the subjective and the inter-subjective level. There is a few more things that are in our nature and in our nurture, and both have a long phylogenetic history. We can make abstractions of these truly complex relations, but we can never escape them.
@Laura one way to look at subjectivity is agency and collective agency. The "objective" thing is entirely in the shared encoding of subjective experience with others, i.e., as to enable shared agency. I always remind myself that subjectivity is dialectic, in one way or the other.
@Codrus in my view Schopenhauer played a special role for Tolstoy. Schopenhauer-inspired people are a special bunch.
@Codrus ... and Schopenhauer inspired the same Tolstoy.
@Laura Thanks - I'll read your paper and share my thoughts with you.