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?

I’m exploring whether an incorporeal ontology could treat consciousness and relational structure as more fundamental than physical substance. What would such a metaphysics need to explain for it to be genuinely ontological rather than simply a conceptual reinterpretation of physical reality?

I’m not asking how we can know whether something exists.

I’m asking what “actually existing” means beyond making the judgment that something exists.

We can say:

• “The Sun exists.”
• “The Sun really exists.”
• “Its existence is an objective fact.”
• “It exists independently of anyone thinking about it.”

But each of these is still a judgment involving the distinction between existence and nonexistence.

If someone says, “The concept of existence is mental, but actual existence is not,” my question is: what is this “actual existence” apart from another judgment that something really exists?

Saying that it is “really there,” “part of reality,” or “an objective fact” seems to restate the same assumption in different words.

My view is that existence and nonexistence are distinctions made in thought. I do not think there is some additional state of “actual existence” outside that distinction.

This is not the claim that nothing exists. “Nothing exists” would simply be another judgment on the nonexistence side of the same distinction.

So the question is:

What is existence itself, apart from judging something to exist or not exist?

I used AI to help organize and summarize my thoughts for this post.

As far as I know (I may be wrong, or there may still be things we haven't figured out), we have a decent picture of how things developed from the formation of the Earth up to now.

But one problem keeps bothering me.

Fine — through chemical reactions, proteins and so on were formed. Yet for those reactions to happen at all, certain conditions have to be met first. Only then does the reaction proceed.

We describe these conditions and regularities as laws of nature.
But why does the universe have these laws at all, and why these laws rather than different ones?