Q U A L I U M

How Morphisms Map the Mind: A Radical Phenomenalist Perspective Setting the Stage: Radical Phenomenalism and Internal Meaning Imagine that everything we ever know is contained within the theater of our own experience. Radical Phenomenalism takes this internalist stance to the extreme: reference and meaning are purely internal, experiential, and predictive. In this view, our mind operates like a self-contained simulation, concerned only with the way one experience leads to another, and any supposed “external reality” beyond experience is a non-issue. Talk of mind-independent things – Kant’s “things-in-themselves,” a purely objective physical world, insentient matter existing beyond anyone’s perception – is considered empty of meaning. These are pseudo-concepts from the radical phenomenalist perspective, since they refer to nothing accessible in experience and thus add nothing to our understanding. As an analogy, a word in a private language that has no connections to any exp...

Old Dude:   (speaking slowly, with careful precision)   The very condition of possibility for spatial perception is a   non-spatial ground . Spatiality is phenomenologically embedded within non-spatial awareness, proven by the phenomenally inaccessible,   non-locatable boundaries   of our perceptual field.   Young Rationalist:   (frowning skeptically)  That’s a dense way to start. You’re saying the only reason we can perceive space is because something  non-spatial  underlies that perception? And you claim the boundaries of what we perceive can’t be located  within  perception, so awareness itself must be non-spatial? Honestly, that sounds counterintuitive. If we  perceive  space, how could the basis of that perception be something that isn’t spatial at all?   Old Dude:  Consider your field of vision right now. You see the room around us—objects laid out in space. Now, try to locate the  edge  of y...