I have however one further comment to make. It seemed to me some of the distance between Strawson and his critics might be bridged by agreeing that reality is participatory – in the sense I think that Wheeler intended – and that this is fundamental irrespective of whether we are considering its mental or material aspects. In that case it would not be so much whether it is necessarily always “like” something to participate in such a reality (I agree with your deconstruction of this sense of “like”), but that it always IS something, with some ineliminable sense of “personal participation”. How such “isness” would ultimately apprehend itself under the appropriate conditions would inevitably be sui generis – incommensurable in some fundamental sense – but its structure and functions, for specific purposes, could potentially be abstractable more or less convincingly and to some degree of precision.

What I’m saying amounts I suppose to a denial of an “arm’s length” view of reality, which poses the artificial problem of how to integrate our participation after the fact, as it were. It is perhaps this “view from nowhere” that leads to the apparent paradox of emergence. If instead we grant at the outset that reality IS participation, we could perhaps find more intuitive – or at least less nausea-inducing – the idea that such participation could eventually yield the sort of self-apprehension characteristic of mind, without the need to transcend a singular category of situated reality.

This hardly amounts to a solution of the mind-body problem, but agreement on some such conceptual levelling of the playing field might help to make some of the detailed disagreements less confusing.