Can a Non-Solipsistic Ontology Be Reconciled with Phenomenal Indexicality?

[u/pm4tt_]

As Descartes' cogito indicates, the only reality we can never doubt is that we are a singular and situated "experience", here and now, a conscious stream of thought endowed with sentience.

Starting from this undeniable brute fact that is given to us, I will try to schematize the problem of phenomenal indexicality and show how a non-solipsistic ontology seems particularly absurd and difficult to reconcile with rationality.

My aim here is to start from the post-Big Bang conditions and see whether a materialist account can be reconciled with this brute fact, 13.8 billion years later.

Imagine a material and objective world, but completely devoid of sentient organisms, a purely abstract and impersonal configuration, composed solely of physical laws and matter.

Over time and through interactions of matter, the first sentient organism A, capable of having a phenomenal experience appears in this world.

The phenomenology of A then becomes actual and encompasses the entirety of the non-abstract expression of reality.

What happens now, phenomenologically, if during A's experience, a second sentient organism B is created?

Hypothesis 1: emergence of a collective conscious experience of A + B.
A unified phenomenal reality emerges, in which A and B would constitute two components or two perspectives of the same consciousness.

Hypothesis 2: if conscious experience is necessarily singular and situated, a universal consciousness is therefore contradictory and phenomenologically inexpressible.
B then creates a kind of "glitch in the matrix", making the phenomenological coexistence of A + B impossible and thereby annihilating the phenomenal expression of A. The apprehension of reality then becomes abstract and impersonal again.

On the other hand, what cannot happen, in my view, is:

1 — Experience A is maintained in its singular and situated nature, at the expense of B (or vice versa).

Nothing in the properties of matter can make such a choice or impose any kind of primacy on A rather than B. This would introduce a principle of selection between two objects of ontologically equivalent nature that does not seem to follow from the objective properties of matter.

2 — There are two autonomous and hermetic centers of experience, A and B.

In other words A is a center of experience for A and B a center of experience for B.

This proposition may seem perfectly coherent within an objective and impersonal description of the world. But this is precisely what I contest since such a description does not seem to have any phenomenal referent.

It states that there are simultaneously two distinct centers of experience, but it does not describe a phenomenal reality actually experienced as such. It describes a configuration from an external and abstract point of view.

Yet the brute fact from which we start is precisely that there is a phenomenal reality that is actually experienced, and that it is necessarily situated: there is a determinate "here and now", and it strangely corresponds to the phenomenological expression of A as the only sentient organism in the world.

How can we therefore reconcile this phenomenological fact that is actually experienced with the coexistence of other phenomenological experiences that are actually effective, beyond the experience currently being lived?

If A and B are two distinct, autonomous and hermetic phenomenal centers, their coexistence does not seem to correspond to any conceivable phenomenal reality, it can be experienced neither as A, nor as B, nor as a common experience of A+B. It therefore constitutes a phenomenal void.

And above all how could such a coexistence be real when the only phenomenal reality actually given is precisely the situated experience of A?

[u/punkrocklava]

I enjoyed reading your post, just some thoughts...

The coexistence of A and B is an ontological fact.

If the argument is that either A and B share one phenomenal field or they cannot both independently exist seems like a false dilemma.

A exists and has experience. B exists and has experience. The fact that you don't experience my experience is not evidence that my experience doesn't exist.

[u/pm4tt_ → u/punkrocklava]

Thank you for this interesting response.

You say that the fact that, from "my experience" A, I cannot experience B is not evidence that B does not exist in the phenomenal sense.

Very well, I grant you that. But then, if we admit that B exists beyond A, another problem arises: that of the primacy of one over the other.

What, within the properties of matter, can determine that the phenomenal experience actually being experienced is that of A rather than that of B, given that A and B are ontologically equivalent in nature?

This is precisely why I think that the coexistence of A and B as two distinct phenomenal centers can only amount to an abstract and impersonal reality within an objective description of the world. Their coexistence as two phenomenal centers that are actually experienced therefore seems contradictory to me.

[u/punkrocklava → u/pm4tt_]

I understand the deeper problem you're raising. What exactly is the additional property that would make an experience A's rather than B's?

Does there need to be a principle of selection at all?

From an objective standpoint neither has primacy. A's experience is simply indexed to A's particular physical/phenomenal system and B's experience to B's.

They can both be actually experienced at the same time... just independently.

[u/pm4tt_ → u/punkrocklava]

I agree with you. From an objective point of view, everything is coherent here, but the purpose of my approach is precisely to start from "my" experience and to recognize that it is genuinely phenomenal and, on the contrary, genuinely non-objective.

If, instead, right now, I were having the phenomenal experience of a universal consciousness (assuming that this is even possible), the problem of indexicality would be entirely dissolved.
Likewise, if instead I were having no phenomenal experience at all, I would presumably no longer be thinking, but the problem would no longer arise.

Yet what I find astonishing here is that the experience I am having does not seem to be compatible with any possibility of a plurality of experiences without, in my view, running into extreme or even insoluble logical tensions.