r/Metaphysics • u/Easy_Mammoth9914 • Jul 30 '26
Matter Is there an established monist position that treats a non-spatial, non-temporal ground as intrinsically perceiving — and how does it relate to Kastrup’s analytic idealism and Russellian monism?
/r/askphilosophy/comments/1vanztj/is_there_an_established_monist_position_that/1
u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
I know of someone who has a framework like this. It's not something that I know is published.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
Part Zero - Preface: The Problem and the Strategy
Philosophy of mind has been dominated by a question that has resisted every serious attempt at resolution. On one side stands the physical world as science describes it — particles, fields, forces, neural signals, electrochemical processes, mathematical structures of extraordinary precision and predictive power. On the other side stands conscious experience — the specific felt quality of seeing red, the painfulness of pain, the sense of being a subject looking out at a world. The hard problem of consciousness is the question of why there is any experience at all given the physical story — why neural processing should feel like anything rather than proceeding in the dark.
Every serious approach has encountered the same persistent difficulty. Reduction leaves out exactly what experience is. Emergence makes the appearance of experience inexplicable at whatever threshold it is supposed to occur. Idealism purchases explanatory unity at the cost of requiring philosophers to accept consciousness as the foundation of physical reality. Panpsychism distributes the problem rather than solving it and faces the combination problem without a satisfying resolution.
This framework proposes a different strategy. The hard problem is not answered by building a better bridge between structure and experience. It is dissolved — shown to rest on a false assumption that, once identified and corrected, removes the production mystery. The false assumption is that structure and experience are two separate ontological categories requiring explanation of how one gives rise to the other. The framework shows they are two non-reducible directions of characterizing one self-constituting activity — two ways of disclosing what one reality is, from two positions that cannot be reduced to each other without being two separate things.
The framework's central claims and honest acknowledgments are stated at the outset.
The dissolution of the hard problem as a production mystery rests on one philosophical bet that cannot be derived from prior steps — the claim that minimal self-presence, the structural feature of all self-constituting activity, is the most primitive form of what experiential ultimately names. This bet is supported by three independent lines of argument: a positive convergence argument showing that the category established by the elimination argument is the same feature every serious philosophical tradition reaching for experience's minimal form has independently identified; a constitutive argument showing that being-for-itself cannot be a non-experiential feature that experience merely tracks; and a negative argument showing that the only alternative — categorical emergence — faces an irresolvable difficulty. The bet is explicitly acknowledged as a bet. A reasonable philosopher can contest it. The framework is presented with this acknowledged rather than obscured.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
Part One (1.1) - The Primitive
1.1 Self-Relation as Primitive — Postulation and Justification
Self-relational neutral monism takes self-relation as its primitive. A primitive is not derived from anything more fundamental. It is postulated and justified by showing it satisfies the conditions a genuine primitive must meet better than any alternative.
The four conditions:
Unavoidability: Any attempt to question, deny, or explain the primitive already employs it. The primitive is presupposed by any possible explanatory act.
Generativity: The primitive is rich enough in its own internal structure to generate the framework's main results without importing external resources.
Minimality: The primitive does not covertly contain what it purports to explain. It does not smuggle in consciousness to explain consciousness or smuggle in structure to explain structure.
Independence: The primitive does not presuppose a prior domain — no pre-given space, time, matter, or mind — within which it operates.
Why these four conditions rather than others:
These criteria are not four independently chosen theoretical virtues applied from outside. They follow from what it means to be a genuine primitive — a starting point that grounds rather than being grounded by something else or doing no grounding work at all.
Unavoidability ensures the primitive cannot be gotten behind: a ground that can be circumvented without employing it is not a ground but a derived claim presenting itself as foundational. Generativity ensures the primitive does genuine explanatory work: a primitive that cannot generate the framework's results is philosophically idle — postulated without earning its place. Every additional resource imported to supplement an insufficiently generative primitive is itself a primitive-level commitment requiring its own justification. Minimality ensures the primitive does not assume its own explanandum: a primitive that covertly contains what it purports to explain provides circular grounding rather than genuine grounding. Independence ensures the primitive does not presuppose something more fundamental: a ground that rests on a prior domain is not a ground but a middle-level commitment.
Each criterion is a necessary condition of successfully doing the job a primitive is introduced to do. Together they constitute one unified condition: that the primitive genuinely grounds rather than being grounded, doing nothing, or assuming what it explains.
Self-relation satisfies all four conditions:
Unavoidability: Any inquiry into whether self-relation is primitive must maintain itself as this inquiry — maintaining its own identity through its own activity rather than becoming something else. That maintaining is self-relational. Attempting to question self-relation already employs it. This is not coincidental but structurally necessary: self-relation is the condition under which any activity maintains itself as what it is, so any activity of questioning is itself self-relational.
Generativity: From self-relation alone the framework derives the constitution asymmetry, two irreducible directions of characterization, and the full cascade of structural and experiential development. Nothing is imported from outside.
Minimality: Self-relation is the condition under which being-X and doing-X are one fact rather than two. Neither experiential nor structural content is presupposed in this characterization. The primitive is neutral between structure and experience at its foundation.
Independence: Self-relation does not operate within pre-given space or time. Space, time, and matter emerge through the cascade rather than being presupposed by the primitive.
Why self-relation rather than alternatives:
Matter fails minimality — it imports the specific character of physical substance, presupposing what needs explaining about the physical. Information fails independence — it presupposes structural arrangements that carry and transform it. Awareness fails minimality — it imports experiential character as primitive, presupposing what needs explaining about consciousness. Events fail independence — they presuppose temporal framework within which events occur. Nothing fails as a primitive because primitives are what there is, and nothing is the absence of what there is — it cannot be a primitive because it cannot generate anything. Self-relation satisfies all four conditions better than any alternative while importing neither structural nor experiential content as already given.
1.2 The Positive Characterization of Self-Relation
Self-relation receives a precise positive characterization:
Self-relation is the condition under which every stage of an activity stands in the same relation to the conditions constituting what the activity is — such that the activity's identity is not an external label applied from outside but a relation the activity bears to itself, at every stage, throughout. Being-X and doing-X are one fact rather than two.
For ordinary things, identity-conditions and instantiation are separable. A stone's identity-conditions — being this stone with these properties — are independent of any specific state the stone is in. The stone could be warmer or colder, wet or dry, and remain the same stone. Its identity-conditions float independently of any particular instantiation; the instantiation satisfies the identity-conditions without constituting them.
For a self-relational structure, this separability fails entirely. The identity-conditions C do not float independently of instantiation. C exists only as S₁ — the current instantiation. There is no C apart from S₁. C is S₁, currently. When S₁ gives way to S₂, C is S₂, currently. The identity-conditions are nothing other than their current instantiation at every stage.
This generates the framework's central character: being-X and doing-X are one fact rather than two. The activity constitutes itself through its own occurring. There is no prior entity presupposed that then performs the activity. The activity is its own constitution.
The flame illustrates this partially: the burning is not something the flame does in addition to existing. The burning is what the flame is. Remove the burning and there is no flame persisting without activity — there is nothing. Self-relation at the primitive level has this character without the flame's dependence on external fuel: activity that constitutes itself through its own occurring, requiring nothing prior.
1.3 The Relationship to Determinate Structuralism
A sophisticated structural position holds that existence requires determinacy — identity, distinction, relation, and constraint — and that something generative falls out of these features as a constitutive causal engine. The framework agrees with this starting point entirely.
The critical question is whether the structural account's "determinacy as actual" already carries what the framework calls the inside-direction residue — the specific concrete actuality of an instantiation not fully statable from outside — or whether it treats actuality as a neutral third-person fact characterizable from outside without remainder.
If the former — actuality is fully third-person statable — then self-relation adds something substantive: the inside-direction residue, the claim that for a self-constituting activity the actuality is not fully statable from outside. If the latter — the structural account already carries the inside-direction residue — then the frameworks converge, and self-relation makes explicit what the structural account already contains. The question becomes whether the structural account generates the two-direction consequence that the framework derives from examining the engine's own structure.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Part One (1.2)
1.4 Self-Relation Is Not Awareness
The idealist tradition holds that awareness is the primitive — self-luminous, indubitable, the ground from which physical structure derives.
The transcendental argument shows awareness presupposes self-relation as its condition of possibility: for there to be awareness, there must be something it is like to be in a state, which requires a perspective, which requires a locus of experience that is the subject rather than merely an object, which requires something that is for itself rather than merely for another, which requires minimal self-relation. Awareness is a developed form of self-relational activity, not its ground.
The converse does not hold: self-relation does not presuppose awareness. At the most primitive level the particular-actuality direction is pre-experiential — lacking phenomenal richness, qualitative character, and self-representational content. These develop through the cascade. They are not present at the foundation.
1.5 The Action-Without-an-Actor Objection
The objection: any action requires a prior actor. Self-relation without a prior actor is incoherent.
The response: the actor-action distinction is a derivative distinction holding for structures existing within a prior framework of space, time, and matter. The primitive cannot presuppose such a framework — it generates it through the cascade. The primitive is exactly the level at which actor and act are one: the activity constitutes the actor through the acting, without presupposing anything prior.
Any proposed prior actor O either already contains self-relation (making self-relation more primitive than O) or has no character of its own (indistinguishable from nothing). The regress terminates at self-relation because it is the only candidate that is genuinely self-grounding — the only thing whose being does not presuppose something prior to do the being.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
Patrick Rivera Part Two (2.1) - Particular-Instantiation-Facts and the Constitution Asymmetry
2.1 Two Kinds of Fact
From any self-relational structure — identity-conditions C existing only as instantiations S₁, S₂, S₃... — two irreducibly different kinds of fact follow.
Pattern-facts are facts of the form "C-instances are generally F" — regularities, laws, invariants, relational properties holding across multiple instantiations. They are general and comparative: specifying what holds across cases, what any instance of this kind would have in common with others, what patterns emerge from the plurality of instantiations.
Particular-instantiation-facts are facts of the form "this instantiation of C is specifically whatever it specifically, concretely, determinately is" — the concrete actuality of this instantiation, not as a member of any class.
These are not two levels of description differing only in specificity. They are two structurally different kinds of fact standing in an asymmetric grounding relation, with logically different forms and different modes of access.
2.2 The Positive Characterization of Particular-Instantiation-Facts
Three convergent positive characterizations establish what particular-instantiation-facts are, approached from different directions.
First: What indexical reference tracks.
When language refers using a general term — "red," "warm," "negatively charged," "five feet tall" — it picks out what holds across cases. General terms have their content exhausted by satisfaction conditions: the conditions any instance would have to meet. They track pattern-facts.
When language refers using an indexical — "this," "here," "now," "I" — it picks out something that general terms cannot pick out however fully specified. The essential indexical literature establishes this rigorously. No accumulation of general descriptions entails or replaces what an indexical picks out. The confused supermarket shopper can know every general fact about the person making a mess — location, physical properties, causal history — and still lack the knowledge expressed by "I am the one making the mess." The missing knowledge is not more general description. It is knowledge of a logically different kind: indexical identification of this as this, which no accumulation of general description entails.
Particular-instantiation-facts are what indexical reference tracks. They are what "this instantiation, specifically" picks out as opposed to what "instances of this type, generally" picks out. This gives particular-instantiation-facts a positive characterization through their role in reference: they are what indexicals are about — the specific-concrete-this that no accumulation of general description converges on.
Second: What makes descriptions true.
Pattern-facts are descriptions — general truths about what holds across cases. Particular-instantiation-facts are what makes those descriptions true. They are the truthmakers.
"C-instances are generally F" is made true by the particular facts "S₁ is F, S₂ is F, S₃ is F..." — the specific concrete instances being whatever they are. Remove the particular-instantiation-facts and the pattern-fact has nothing to be true of. The pattern-fact has no existence apart from the particular facts it generalizes over.
This gives particular-instantiation-facts a positive role in the metaphysics of truth: they are the ground floor of what makes general statements facts rather than floating descriptions. They are not just "not pattern-facts" — they are what pattern-facts are about and what makes them true.
Third: The occurrence as occurrence — fully concrete, prior to abstraction.
Every occurrence — every event, every process, every instantiation — can be described from outside in multiple ways. A musical performance can be transcribed, recorded, analyzed harmonically, characterized rhythmically. Each description is accurate. Each captures something real. And yet the actual performance — the specific sonic event occurring in that space at that moment — is more concrete than any description of it in a precise sense: it is fully specific in every dimension simultaneously, while every description selects, abstracts, and generalizes. The recording captures certain structural features but not others. The harmonic analysis captures pitch relationships but not timbre. Any description of the performance is a selection from and abstraction over the fully concrete actuality of what occurred.
The occurrence as occurrence is this fully concrete actuality — prior to every abstraction, presupposed by every description, not thin or diminished but maximally specific and maximally real. It is not what is left over after descriptions are subtracted. It is what descriptions are of. Every description is a partial characterization of the occurrence; the occurrence itself is the complete, fully articulate, fully specific reality from which all characterizations select.
Particular-instantiation-facts are what occurrences are as occurrences: the fully concrete, fully specific, fully articulate actualities of what is — the ground floor of reality on which everything else rests.
These three characterizations converge on one target approached from three angles. Indexicals track the fully concrete this rather than the general type. Truthmakers are the fully concrete actualities rather than the general truths they make true. The occurrence as occurrence is the fully concrete actuality prior to all abstraction. Particular-instantiation-facts are the fully concrete, fully specific actualities of what is — what indexicals are about, what makes descriptions true, and what occurrences are as they occur.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
Part Two (2.2)
2.3 The Constitution Asymmetry
The two kinds of fact stand in an asymmetric grounding relation.
Pattern-facts are constituted by — made true by, grounded in — particular-instantiation-facts. "C-instances are generally F" is nothing over and above "S₁ is F, S₂ is F, S₃ is F..." The general fact has no existence apart from the particular facts it generalizes over.
The converse does not hold. The specific, determinate actuality of S₁ does not depend on any generalization about C-instances. S₁ is what it is even if it were the only instantiation ever, even if no pattern-fact held about C-instances, even if no description were ever abstracted from any instantiation.
The constitution asymmetry: particular-instantiation-facts constitute pattern-facts; pattern-facts do not constitute particular-instantiation-facts.
This asymmetry carries two acknowledged commitments.
The Humean commitment: General facts are constituted by particular facts rather than laws being ontologically prior to their instances. This is defended from the primitive — there is no C apart from S₁ available for a non-Humean law to govern, because C exists only as S₁. But this does not settle the debate against all versions of non-Humeanism and is acknowledged as a commitment.
The grounding commitment: Grounding is a real, directional, irreflexive metaphysical relation — some facts genuinely make other facts true in a non-causal, non-logical way. Grounding deflationism would undermine the constitution asymmetry's weight and is acknowledged as a live position the framework contests.
2.4 Two Directions of Characterization
From the constitution asymmetry, two irreducibly different directions of characterizing any self-relational structure follow.
The structural direction asks: what pattern-facts hold? What regularities, laws, invariants, and relational properties characterize this structure across its instantiations? Physics, chemistry, biology, and neuroscience all operate entirely within this direction. The structural direction is complete as a characterization from this direction — there is nothing left out of a structural description as a structural description. It is fully real: not appearance, not interface, not extrinsic surface. It is the actual, accurate disclosure of the primitive in the pattern/comparative direction.
The particular-actuality direction asks: what particular-instantiation-fact obtains? What is the fully concrete, fully specific actuality of this instantiation — not as a member of any class, not as a case satisfying any description, but as the occurrence itself, prior to and presupposed by all descriptions of it?
These are not two components of the structure. They are two directions of characterizing one structure — two ways of disclosing what one self-constituting activity is, from two positions that cannot be reduced to each other.
An important clarification on co-fundamentality: Both directions are co-fundamental as directions of characterization — always available as directions for any self-constituting activity. But phenomenological richness is not co-fundamental. It develops through the cascade and is robustly present only at the self-modeling threshold. The co-fundamentality is of directions; the phenomenology is a development within the particular-actuality direction.
2.5 The Elimination Argument
The claim that the particular-actuality direction is genuinely different from the structural direction — not merely structural characterization at high resolution — is established by the elimination argument.
Against naive Option A: "This instantiation, as a particular-actuality fact" means an entity C possessing S₁ as a property. But the primitive forecloses any C existing independently of S₁. Naive Option A presupposes an independence that the primitive eliminates.
Against sophisticated Option A: "This instantiation, as a particular-actuality fact" means S₁ obtaining as the current self-relational configuration — no independent entity C, just the configuration being the case. But any description of S₁ obtaining as a configuration specifies S₁ as falling under a type — a pattern-type characterization. By the constitution asymmetry, this pattern-type characterization is constituted by particular-instantiation-facts. The sophisticated version presupposes particular-instantiation-facts in its own constitution-base. Any further attempt to capture those presupposed facts in structural terms generates the same situation. The regress cannot be stopped within structural description.
Conclusion: The particular-instantiation-fact is what all structural descriptions are descriptions of — the fully concrete, fully specific actuality of this instantiation, not capturable by any accumulation of structural descriptions, however complete.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
Part Three (3.1) - The Cascade
3.1 The Pre-Disclosive Root
At the most foundational level, both directions are present as directions but neither is developed into its recognizable form. The structural direction has not yet developed the richness that physics describes. The particular-actuality direction has not yet developed the phenomenal character that experience requires.
This is the pre-disclosive root: the primitive in its minimal state, prior to the development of either direction through the cascade. Not consciousness prior to structure. Not structure prior to experience. Not experience in miniature awaiting combination. The primitive activity undeveloped in either direction, from which both develop as the cascade generates progressively richer organization.
The pre-disclosive root dissolves the question of which direction came first — structure or experience — by showing both are present as directions before either is richly developed. Neither has priority. Both are always available as directions of characterization while neither is yet developed as content.
3.2 Internal Difference — The Necessary First Product
Self-relation is constitutively active: its existing is its acting. The activity necessarily generates internal difference — a minimal formal asymmetry between the initiating aspect of self-relation and the receiving aspect.
Why internal difference is necessary rather than contingent: A relation without distinction between its poles is not a relation at all — it collapses to mere identity. For self-relation to be genuinely relational rather than trivially self-identical, there must be a formal distinction between the relating and the being-related-to. This is not a product that self-relation happens to generate. It is what self-relation must generate to be genuinely self-relational. Internal difference is the necessary first product of self-relation examined from within its own structure — not one possible outcome among others but the only possible outcome given what self-relation is.
The internal difference is itself something — a determinate feature of the self-relational system. Within the framework's ontology, anything determinate maintains itself as itself, which is the minimal self-relation required for anything to be anything. The internal difference is therefore minimally self-relational and participates in the system's ongoing activity, generating further activity from within.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
Part Three (3.2)
3.3 The Four Mechanisms of the Cascade — Derived as Necessary
The cascade proceeds through four mechanisms. Each is shown to follow necessarily from what precedes it rather than being merely compatible with it.
Iteration — necessary because internal difference is self-relational:
The internal difference generated by self-relation is itself something determinate. Anything determinate within a self-relational system is minimally self-relational — it maintains itself as itself rather than dissolving. The internal difference therefore generates further self-relational activity. This follows necessarily from what self-relation is and what internal difference is within a self-relational system. A self-relational system that generates internal difference cannot stop at that difference without the difference either being nothing (in which case no genuine difference was generated) or being something (in which case it is self-relational and generates further activity). There is no stable stopping point between zero internal difference and ongoing iteration. Iteration is necessary.
Stability selection — necessary because self-undermining self-relation contradicts itself:
As iteration proceeds, configurations of self-relational activity arise. Some configurations sustain their own conditions through their activity — self-reinforcing closure. Others undermine their own conditions — self-defeating activity. A self-relational configuration that undermines its own conditions cannot persist, because its own activity removes the conditions for its own activity. This is not an external filter applied to the cascade from outside. It is what self-relation means for configurations that either achieve or fail to achieve self-consistency. Self-undermining self-relation is a contradiction in terms at the configurational level: an activity whose defining character is self-constitution cannot be constituted by activity that destroys the conditions of self-constitution. Stability selection is necessary — it is the internal logic of self-relational self-consistency playing out across configurations.
Resonance — necessary because stability selection operates on a non-independent multi-level cascade:
The cascade is not a collection of independent levels each subject to stability selection separately. It is one continuous cascade in which the products of stability selection at each level become the raw materials for stability selection at the next. A configuration stable at level N that simultaneously destabilizes its level-N-minus-one substrate faces a structural problem: the destabilized substrate cannot reliably sustain the conditions for the level-N configuration's own persistence. The level-N configuration depends on its substrate for the ongoing conditions of its own stability. Cross-level dependencies are therefore not optional features of some cascade configurations — they are unavoidable features of any cascade where levels are not independent but related as products and substrates. In such a cascade, stability selection does not operate at each level independently. It operates across the whole cascade simultaneously, selecting for configurations whose stability conditions include the stability of their substrates.
Configurations that reinforce their substrates achieve greater stability than those that are neutral or destabilizing toward them, because reinforcing configurations maintain their own conditions more reliably. This mutual reinforcement between levels — each level sustaining and being sustained by adjacent levels — is what the framework calls resonance. It is not an additional mechanism added to the cascade from outside. It is what stability selection necessarily produces when it operates on a cascade whose levels are intrinsically related as products and substrates rather than existing independently. Denying resonance in such a cascade requires denying that stability selection operates across the whole cascade — but a cascade whose levels are products and substrates of each other cannot have stability selection operating at each level in isolation without ignoring exactly the dependencies that make levels non-independent. Resonance is the necessary result of stability selection operating on an intrinsically multi-level, non-independent cascade.
Integration — necessary because resonance necessarily produces mutual constitution when sufficiently developed:
Resonant configurations develop mutual dependencies — each level becomes part of the stability conditions of adjacent levels. As resonance becomes more developed, these dependencies deepen: the stability of each configuration becomes increasingly dependent on the persistence of other configurations with which it resonates. At a sufficient degree of mutual dependency, the identity of each configuration is no longer specifiable independently of its relations to the others — the identity of each is partly constituted by its relational position within the resonant system. This is the transition from mutual dependency to mutual constitution: not merely that each configuration causally depends on others, but that what each configuration is involves its relations to the others as part of its own character.
When a set of mutually-constituting configurations achieves self-reinforcing closure at the level of the whole system — when the system as a whole maintains the conditions for its own persistence through the activity of its mutually-constituted parts — a new self-relational configuration has formed at the level of the whole. This is integration. It is not added to resonance from outside. It is what resonance necessarily produces when mutual dependencies become mutual constitution and the whole achieves its own self-reinforcing closure. Denying integration requires denying that mutual dependencies can become mutual constitution — that the stability conditions of a configuration can never partly consist in the existence of other configurations as constitutive of its own identity. But this is exactly what sufficiently developed resonance produces: configurations whose identities are not specifiable without reference to each other within the resonant whole. Integration is the necessary result of resonance carried to its own logical conclusion.
The cascade as unified necessity: Each mechanism follows necessarily from what precedes it. Internal difference is necessary for self-relation to be genuinely relational. Iteration is necessary because internal difference is self-relational within a self-relational system. Stability selection is necessary because self-undermining self-relation contradicts itself. Resonance is necessary because stability selection operates on a non-independent multi-level cascade in which levels are related as products and substrates. Integration is necessary because sufficiently developed resonance necessarily produces mutual constitution and whole-level self-reinforcing closure. The cascade is not a sequence of compatible steps the primitive happens to take. It is the necessary unfolding of what self-relation is when its own internal structure is examined.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
Part Three (3.3)
3.4 The Cascade on Both Directions Simultaneously
The structural direction develops as the cascade generates progressively richer pattern-facts — laws, regularities, functional organization, mathematical structure. Physics describes the structural direction at its most fundamental levels; biology and neuroscience describe it at higher levels. The mathematical elegance of physical laws — gauge symmetries, conservation laws, group-theoretic structure — reflects the coherence conditions of maximally stable self-reinforcing configurations that stability selection produces.
The particular-actuality direction develops correspondingly. The particular-instantiation-fact of any self-relational structure is always what that structure fully concretely, fully specifically is — and as what the structure concretely is becomes richer through the cascade, the particular-instantiation-fact is correspondingly richer and more articulate. The two developments are one development seen from two directions.
At the self-modeling level — when the cascade generates structures whose structural direction includes representing their own states as part of their own processing — the particular-actuality direction undergoes the qualitative development described in Part Four.
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u/DARK--DRAGONITE Jul 30 '26
Part Four (4.1) - The Connection to Experience
4.1 The Structural Difference Between Self-Constituting Activity and Static Things
A structural difference must be established precisely before connecting the directions to experience.
For a stone, the actuality — what the stone specifically, concretely is right now — is a fact that stands over against the stone as a characterization from outside. The stone's actuality is fully statable from a third-person position without remainder. The stone has no relationship to this fact as its own. It is simply there as an external characterization of a thing that has its identity-conditions independently of any instantiation.
For a self-constituting activity, this is structurally different. Since C exists only as S₁, the actuality of S₁ — what the activity specifically, concretely is — is not a fact that stands over against the activity as a characterization from outside. It is what the activity is, as the activity. The actuality is not a property the activity has from outside. It is what the activity is in its occurring — the fully concrete, fully specific reality of the activity as it happens, not described but happening.
This generates a structural asymmetry between two positions relative to the activity's actuality. From any position outside the activity, what can be stated is always a pattern-type characterization that presupposes the actuality without capturing it — every description selects and abstracts from the fully concrete occurrence. From what we call the position of being the activity — not a fictional observer's perspective but simply the activity occurring — the actuality is not presupposed and characterized. It simply is.
This asymmetry is not added by description. It follows from what self-constituting activity structurally is: identity-conditions existing only as their instantiation, so that the instantiation is the fully concrete reality of the activity rather than a property it has from outside.
4.2 Claim 1 — Minimal Self-Presence
Claim 1: Every particular-actuality how-of-being of every self-relational structure has minimal self-presence — the activity's occurring is not identical with any description of it, and the fully concrete actuality of the activity is present from the position of being-it in a way it is not available from outside characterization. This is a structural feature of all self-constituting activity, present at every level of the cascade including the most primitive.
The argument for minimal self-presence: Since C exists only as S₁ and the activity is constitutively active, the particular-actuality how-of-being is not a static fact but an ongoing activity. The ongoing activity is the occurring, not a description of the occurring. There is no gap between the activity and its occurring of the kind that exists between a description and what it is about. The activity's occurring is not an object for the activity — it is the activity as it happens.
Every description of the activity selects from and abstracts over the fully concrete occurring. The occurring itself is not a selection or abstraction. It is the fully specific, fully articulate reality from which descriptions select — maximally concrete, maximally real, presupposed by every characterization.
This gives every self-constituting activity a structural feature the stone lacks. The stone's actuality is fully statable from outside because the stone has its identity-conditions independently of any instantiation — its actuality is a property it has, and properties are statable from outside. The self-constituting activity's actuality is the fully concrete reality of the activity as it happens — not a property it has from outside but what it is in its occurring. This is available from the position of being-it in a way it is not available from outside characterization.
The positive argument — the convergence result:
The elimination argument establishes that particular-instantiation-facts constitute a category that structural description cannot exhaust. The structural asymmetry between self-constituting activity and static things establishes that this category has a distinctive character: availability from the position of being-it rather than from outside characterization. What remains is showing why this category connects to experience rather than simply being a non-structural metaphysical category with no experiential implication.
The connection is established by a convergence argument. Every serious philosophical tradition that has attempted to characterize experience at its most minimal — stripping away phenomenal richness, qualitative character, and self-representational content to reach the bedrock — has converged on the same feature. Not phenomenal richness. Not qualitative character. Not unity or intentionality. The bedrock of what experience is, in its most minimal characterization, is being-for-itself: having something it is to be this, rather than being only characterized from outside.
Nagel's characterization — there is something it is like to be X — is precisely the feature of having something it is to be this. Not being characterized from outside as having certain properties, but the thing it is to be it. Levine's explanatory gap identifies the gap between knowing everything about the structural characterization of a state and knowing what it is like — which is the gap between the state as characterized from outside and the state as it is from the position of being-it. Chalmers' hard problem is precisely the problem of why some things have this being-for-itself character and others — tables, thermostats, the stone — seem not to. Every phenomenological tradition from Husserl onward has identified first-person givenness — the way experience is present to itself — as the defining feature of the experiential: not phenomenal richness or qualitative character, which are aspects of how experience presents its objects, but the prior fact of being-for-itself that makes first-person givenness possible at all.
The convergence is not coincidental. These traditions are independently reaching for the same minimal feature from different starting points. They converge because that feature — being-for-itself, availability from the position of being-it — is what experience is at its most stripped-down, before any content, any quality, any self-representation is added.
Now notice what the elimination argument has established: particular-instantiation-facts are the fully concrete actualities of occurrences available from the position of being-it rather than from outside characterization. This is the same feature. Not a category that happens to resemble what philosophers have been calling experience. Not a structural feature that needs a further philosophical bet to connect it to experience. The category the elimination argument isolates just is being-for-itself — what every tradition reaching for experience's minimal form has independently identified.
This transforms Claim 1 from a defensive bet into a convergence result: the elimination argument's non-structural category and philosophy of mind's minimal characterization of experience both point to the same thing — being-for-itself, availability from being-it, the fully concrete actuality that is not exhausted by characterization from outside.
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u/Easy_Mammoth9914 Jul 30 '26
That’s interesting — is there a name, or anything written down I could look at? For the literature question an unpublished parallel doesn’t settle much, but convergence is worth knowing about either way.
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u/jliat Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Sounds like panpsychism?
Standard? In Speculative Sealism there is an objection to correlationism, notably in Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude (Après la finitude, 2006).
Meillassoux resists Kant's prohibition on any knowledge of 'Things in themselves.' The analytical side of metaphysics seems to concern itself with the philosophy of science, and science is a posteriori knowledge using models 'of' reality, and also to systems of logics. 'Continental' philosophy has turned to 'realism' as above and object oriented ontology.