I agree with your direction, but have qualms with your points. Suppose for absurdity I replay my original argument, but with humans, and you reply "that doesn'

I agree with your direction, but have qualms with your points. Suppose for absurdity I replay my original argument, but with humans, and you reply "that doesn't mean humans are conscious; it means that the things which are housed within skulls are conscious". I understand the nuance you're introducing, but don't think that it helps. Part of the difficulty of the Combination Problem is that the boundary of conscious control extends beyond the nexus of thought. I'll accept that rocks are just the substrate, but integrated circuits are just carefully cooked rocks; substrate-vs-consciousness thinking might be wrong. I agree with you that science is done empirically, and thus doesn't experience objectivity. However, maths is quite formal, and in the past century we managed to achieve "formal formality" with category theory. We now can talk of certain objects as existing universally; in their context, not only do they exist, but they uniquely exist. For example, `1+1=2`, which is to say that there's an equivalence between any pair of objects selected one by one, and any pair taken both at a time; for any particular counting context, there's only one natural numbers object. I am not quite as pessimistic as you regarding the quality of the conclusions that we reach. Rather than saying that our filters make us subjective, I would simply say that the experiences of humanity are essentially human. There's an anthropic bias because humans can't experience anything that isn't human; we can't think truly alien ideas or build truly alien artifacts. Everything we think is non-human is actually human. This doesn't prevent us from drawing conclusions, but it does forbid objectivity.