Consciousness remains a mystery, physics remains incomplete, and science requires a paradigmatic revolution to sufficiently explain how consciousness manifests within the world in the first place or at all. But science’s unrelenting concentration upon only that which is manifest will never yield this explanation because the very possibility of consciousness—moreover, the possibility of existence itself—begins prior to what is manifested within the actualized world and realized experience. Rather, it emerges from the radically preconditional realm of existentially exhaustive Possibility simpliciter. In disclosing the singular grounding Possibility of there being possibilities at all as the basis of all beings, we reveal a fundamental ontology of Being, potentiality, actuality, reality, sensibility, responsiveness, local causality, and teleological effectuality that explains the intrinsic unity and implicit qualities of entities in their myriad modalities of existence and expression, including emergent phenomenal and intentional consciousness. Thus, Possibility is the Being of beings that makes the reality of consciousness and the actuality of the world viable, unified, and existent simpliciter. Commencing our inquiries from within the fundamental ontology of Ontic Modalism (OM), in performing an ontological analysis of one of the leading scientific theories of consciousness known as Integrated Information Theory or IIT, we reveal crucial solutions […]

I do not believe that I am a disembodied spirit, somehow magically tied to this body. What I do believe is that this existence, in and of itself, along with our innate power of reason, will provide all that we need to learn about our world, who we are, our role in it, and how it is that we have come to be consciously aware of it at all. Consciousness is our foundation. Consciousness is our raison d’etre. Consciousness is where we live, our ‘wheelhouse’. It is consciousness that gives us our world. Understanding consciousness is crucial to our understanding…everything.

Neutral monism is the position that everything that exists is all of a single ontologically fundamental type. There is just one fundamental type of thing in all existence; and that thing either includes the mental and the physical at its foundational level. This neutral strategy strives to avoid the pitfalls of substance dualism, while allowing for the manifest facticity of mental and physical entities, states, types, and kinds.

There is a hashtag in social media that describes a recent, though hardly novel concept: #WOKE. In this current context, being “woke” is a description of a politically charged state of consciousness, above and beyond previously normal states, that entails a new level of hyper-awareness of the social and political climate, particularly regarding the plight of underrepresented and oppressed minorities and the economically powerless. It entails a new understanding of, and a new attitude towards, the underlying inequities in our global socio-political arena. It is an implored call to action in relation to those inequities. It also entails the previous state of not being #WOKE, of not being aware at this preferable level. I would like to submit that we should all enter a new state of being #WOKE; but not simply politically or socially or economically. We need to be woke in a much more profound and universal sense. We need to be woke to the essential and imperative activity of all conscious beings. We need to be woke to the fact that consciousness, itself, is our raison d’être—that our purpose in the universe is to be aware of it, and to share that awareness with as many other conscious […]

The Ocean of Experience As conscious beings, we are ever swimming in a sea of mind, continuously saturated by the tidal ebb and flow of sense data from rich, complex, and accessible floods of phenomenal expression. It is no small wonder that we have somehow come to consciously experience that ocean of phenomenal waves washing over us, moving us, and supporting us in its physiophenomenal buoyancy. For as both physical and phenomenal ‘fish’, how is it possible that we can understand what that ocean of mind might be when we are constantly surrounded and saturated by it? How can we rise above the water’s surface as spinning porpoises or breaching whales, launching our minds into the air of awareness, only to look down upon that cool expanse of sensuous liquid from whence we have escaped its sensorial surface to finally recognize it for what it is…for what we are? Our understanding of this vast ocean of phenomenal reality—viewed by us through our tiny portals of conscious experience—focuses only upon an immediate and infinitesimal aspect of the entire universe of potential experiential qualities and relations, from one conscious moment to the next. But beneath the surface of our private pools of […]

Perhaps all of the metaphysical models of consciousness from mainstream western philosophy have failed to satisfactorily close the substance dualism gap; but certainly all of them have failed to close the experiential gap of consciousness. Philosopher, David Chalmers calls for a new Hegelian synthesis to address critical combination problems within the current forms of panqualityism and Russellian monism, still with hope to move these positions forward. But it is the experiential gap that is our final frontier to cross. That is the darkest epistemic prison out of which we must escape to solve the hard problem of consciousness. Panqualityism and Russellian monism do not provide an elegant and robust connection between fundamentally extant entities, their intrinsic qualities, the combination of those qualities, the expression of those qualities, and the final experience of those qualities, because they fall into the same experiential gap as do all too many purported models of conscious experience. Unless and until we can describe an ontological and phenomenological model that allows natural and seamless interaction between consciousness and the expressed qualities of the phenomenal existents those qualities compose, we are forever halted at the precipice of this gap of experience. To answer this challenge, the metaphysical […]