I think that there is an ongoing conspiracy in the philosophical community, an organized form of self-deception, as in a cult, to simply all together pretend that we knew what "first-person perspective" (or "quale" or "consciousness") means, so that we can keep our traditional debates running on forever.

Consciousness is phenomenologically subjective whenever there is a stable, consciously experienced first-person perspective.

Of course, I strongly sympathized with Habermas and the philosophers representing the Frankfurt school, but I also saw the lack of conceptual clarity, and perceived the not-so-revolutionary self-importance in the epigones of Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas.

As a philosopher, you define constraints for any good theory explaining what you are interested in, then you go out and search for help in other disciplines.

At 19, I basically held the position that if you were intellectually honest and really wanted to get in touch with political reality then you had to smell tear-gas.

The self is not a thing, but a process.

As a first-order approximation, I would say that phenomenality is "availability for introspective attention": Consciousness is a property of all those mental contents to which you can in principle direct your attention.