| | Frank,
I want to avoid being too harsh for a first article attempt, but I suspect I'm going to fail. I have strong disagreements with this article. More importantly, you bit off quite a lot for a first attempt. There are many controversial points in your article, and you don't focus on any of them long enough to let us even know you realize that they're controversial. Let me give some examples:
Claim 1: You suggest that a conscious thought requires simultaneous events in the brain.
Implication 1: A thought is a mental state, instead of a mental process.
Implication 2: The parts of the event all happen simultaneously instead of just very quickly. We look at a computer screen, and it appears as a single state. But in fact, it's printing those pixels one after another in a serialized fashioned, just so fast that we can't experience any difference. Why are you convinced this same kind of thing isn't going on in the brain?
Claim 2: There is some kind of localized phenomena which is our consciousness. Why can't it be distributed?
Claim 3: The ability to project music into the future (through extrapolation or memorization) implies we are actually conscious of the future.
Claim 4: The ability to remember the past music implies we are actually conscious of the past (that is, we're directly experiencing the past, and not just a memory of it).
Claim 5: A great composer who says he can hear their whole composition should be interpreted to mean he is somehow experiencing a 4 dimensional direct awareness.
Claim 6: Any of the axioms you mentioned are axiomatic concepts. Like playfulness?
Claim 7: You say that the sensory object in U "gives rise" to the feelings in I. This appears to contradict the Objectivist view of emotions and substitutes some form of intrinsicism.
Claim 8: "It exercises its free will in trying to find more attractive feelings." Free will allows people to find less attractive feelings. This view of Free Will is also not compatible with Objectivism. It actually comes off as determinism, as you seem to describe the observer as automatically driven to pursue feelings. I could also add that it comes off as hedonistic in terms of ethics, against contradicting Objectivism.
Claim 9: You seem to be rejecting special relativity as well.
If you had made any one of these points as the basis of your article, it would have been controversial. By having all of them, it's really hard to know where to start. You seem to reject Identity, Causality, Free Will, the nature of Axioms, and Consciousness as a process.
My advice is to be a little less ambitious. Walk before you run. If you're going to make controversial claims, stick to one at a time and give a rigorous defense of it. Remember that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof. And in terms of Objectivism, it's better to stick to the basics until you've fully digested them. While it's interesting to try to make revolutionary changes, your audience won't be convinced until you've shown that you understand the basics. Someone who rejects Objectivist ideas needs to understand what he's rejecting if he wants to persuade Objectivists that he's right.
I've also changed the category of this article. While it may be thought provoking, it's too much of a stretch to put it under the Objectivism category.
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