Fair enough--thanks for the long discussion!

Honestly, I never was able to even identify the categorical distinction that you speak of as a category, only as a language game that doesn't seem particularly worth playing (in that it obscures rather than reveals). Indeed, we just concluded that conscious observers aren't physically special in any way as compared to non-conscious macroscopic objects, which seems to me to mean that conscious observers can only be linguistically special, and I'm happy to just drop that part and stick with the physical.

But you seem to think that rather than demoting the issue to language, it needs to be raised to the most fundamental issue of ontology.

Anyway, after this many posts, I agree--we should just give it a rest.