the frontier of consciousness
The frontier of consciousness studies is not neuroscience or psychedelics, it's aphantasia and Tulpas and schizophrenia and synesthesia and tetrachromacy and octopi. It's Spiritual Geometry: formalizing and formulizing all of the most important aspects of humanity.
Good is preferable to evil. That's a discernable relationship of elements that matter. All such relationships can be elicited and gathered and colated and compared and built up into Practical Wisdom.
People generally prefer certain behaviours in others. People generally prefer certain physical attributes in others. These are spiritual facts about human reality. They can be plugged into a Spiritual Geometry formula with some degree of precision. The parties to the relationship don't have to be specific for their relationship to be.
The frontier of consciousness is to build the ultimate Universal Taxonomy of all those relationships and find the Spiritual Geometry of it to build Practical Wisdom.
Spiritual Geometry encompasses sociology, psychology, philosophy, and religion.
Wow, this is great. Keep going with this stuff... Spiritual Geometry, Wow good
I began outlining just such a Spiritual Geometry with an AI, but I think I might have overstepped somehow because I was prevented from proceeding. I am probably going to develop it on my own. Your thoughts, as described here, pretty much perfectly align with my own. I am not claiming priority, but I am claiming to have reached these conclusions on my own. The spiritual taxonomy is the key idea. Using it we can classify mind right up to consciousness. I have already made some progress on this front. The way I envisage it, it would be done axiomatically within a formal system of semiotics (theory of signs). Every other science would be expressible in terms of semiotics. Everything in the universe is semiosis, including consciousness. And, crucially, as you point out, feelings like love and hate are real: the one we are drawn to, the other we are repulsed by (unless we have lost our way). Our purpose as conscious beings is to maximise the relations which express love and other moral goods.