Philosophical Fragments

On Being

1. Time

When I was a child, I thought that death is so far in the future that life is practically eternal. Now I know that even if I lived longer than the Sun, and then everything ended, those ten billion years would become a nothingness.

I exist, and there is no such thing as nonexistence. My non-being is unthinkable and thus impossible.

The thought of my non-being is self-contradictory.

If the thought of my non-being were meaningful, I would have to be able to think of it. I can try to think of it because I exist, but just for that reason the thought collapses into absurdity.

I may think that it is logically quite possible that I do not exist. However, this is a strange and erroneous thought, for existence and logic presuppose each other: existence follows the laws of logic, but if I did not exist, there would be no logic either.

Being has no opposite. Non-being is not.

Existence means 'being of anything', but non-being means 'non-being of something somewhere'. We cannot speak of non-being in general in a meaningful way.

The proposition ”There is no such thing as non-being” is, of course, a tautology. Nevertheless, it expresses a basic property of existence that we seldom think of.

My existence does not depend on time. I exist eternally.

Endlessness is a logical property of my existence. The proposition ”I exist” is always true.

Perhaps I am no longer young. But what does it mean that I exist no more?

Someone is perhaps no more with me in the world, because that someone is dead. But I exist always.

Expressions like ”If I did not exist...” and ”When I shall not exist any more...” have no rational content.

Existence means that I am experiencing something here and now. Existence is my existence.

Only I exist. Being of others and objects is the consequence of my existence.

Others and objects constitute the world. The world is, because I exist.

Everything that is, is connected to my existence.

If I did not exist, there would be nothing.

Existence means that my present experience changes to a new experience.

There is nothing between two successive experiences. There is only an experience and then another experience.

Every experience is followed by a new experience.

There is no last experience.

If there were the last experience, that is, an experience after which there would be no experiences, there would be no experiences at all, present, past or future, including this experience that I have now.

All experiences are my experiences.

An experience takes place here and now. Therefore only I can have it.

There are no experiences foreign to me. This is a solid basis for ethics.

What I do to another, I do to myself.

What I do to another would make no difference if I were not the object of that act.

Those who have understood that the soul transmigrates, have also understood that if they step on an ant, they disturb the stream of existence along which they themselves flow.

The experiences that I do not have at the moment, are in the past or in the future.

The past and the future are determined in relation to my present experience.

Time is the basic property of my existence which determines that my present experience is followed by a new experience.

Time is the nucleus of existence.

Existence without time is a conceptual impossibility.

Time is the necessary form of having experiences. I can exist only if the content of my experience changes to another content.

All experiences are in temporal relation to each other. They make a series.

Experiences are like a row of lights that one after the other and one at a time go on and off. The light that is on, is my present experience.

As I am writing this, lights go on and off. As you are reading this, other lights go on and off.

Time and eternity are not opposites. Time is eternal.

Time is eternity built by successive presents.

Eternity is endlessness of experiences. It realizes itself in time. Here.

Someone has said that a moment is an intersection of time and eternity. But this thought mystifies eternity. Time builds itself from present moments that follow each other eternally.

Now is always. And now is always something.

Our fear that time will come to an end has no rational ground. Our hope that time will change to timelessness is absurd. Our hope for eternity has already come true.

An experience can refer to earlier experiences. Memory is built up from these references.

Memory defines an individual.

An individual is a series of experiences that memory connects to each other.

Individuals make a temporal series.

On one hand I am an individual, on the other hand I am that which goes through all individual forms.

As an individual I am mortal, but as that which has experiences, as the subject, I am immortal.

Forms disappear, but that which changes form does not disappear.

As an individual I am my memory, as the subject I am nothing.

All that is disappears, hence also the individual that I am. Only the nothing for which all being is, is eternal.

Because, as the subject, I am nothing, I cannot disappear. Therefore I have to exist eternally.

I am an individual about whom I can say: ”When I shall not live any more...” On the other hand, expressions like ”When I shall not exist any more...” are meaningless.

The subject is always the same: the one that exists here and now. That is, I. But my name is all names.

I am, as the subject, the subject of all contents of experience. That I am the subject of all contents is a fundamental property of time. Time connects experiences to each other in such a way that all experiences are mine.

That I am nothing as the subject means that even though I have an experience each moment, and even though I have all experiences in the flow of time, experiences have no such relations of reference to each other that there would be some kind of property remaining through all experiences, an eternal memory or identity. Only time connects all experiences to each other: they all have a position in the common time series.

The proposition ”I exist” is true also when I am dead.

The individual that I am dies. But someone is born. I.

Death is forgetting.

When a new experience does not contain a reference to my present experience, I am dead.

Because there is nothing between successive experiences, only memory makes a difference between life and death.

An experience dies immediately after it is born, but a new experience can revive it by remembering it.

The present dies into the past, revives in repeated memories, and then disappears for good.

Now I have this experience and then I have a new experience. If my new experience contains something connected to my previous experience, my life goes on. Else I am dead and just born.

The present wanders through reality dragging and dropping fragments of the past.

When I die, a fragment of the past drops away.

The past that is present as memories, vanishes from sight when I die.

When I am dead, I am another individual.

When I am dead, I do not remember the individual that I was.

When I am dead, I am someone who is now for me an other, and for whom I am an other.

When I am dead, someone else has written these sentences.

Everybody knows what it is like to be dead.

I have left the one I was, and now that I am dead, I am this one, whom I shall also leave soon.

When I die, I leave myself.

Death is a leap by which I move from one point of space-time to another without speed.

The stream is invisible and Charon is swift. Suddenly I am in these strange surroundings and I do not remember where I came here from.

Life is a journey from oblivion to oblivion. Existence means being always on some life-long journey.

Life and death are not phenomena. Life is the flow of phenomena for an individual, and death is the memory break that separates one individual from another.

Phenomena occur to me, and when I am dead, they occur to the other that I am.

Death is nothing. There is only the last experience of an individual and the first experience of another individual.

The end is a beginning.

2. The World

God wondered if He should create the world or not. He decided not to do it. But now Man got furious: ”What kind of a Creator are you, not doing what you are supposed to do! Create me at least!” So God had to create Man and the world for him to live in.

Some people think that first there was nature without consciousness, and then at some point consciousness appeared as a property of nature. However, this is a misleading picture of the relation between nature and consciousness, because it suggests that consciousness could also not have appeared, and that we can imagine nature without consciousness. But because I exist and cannot ”non-exist”, consciousness exists necessarily and needs nature and its evolution to realize my existence.

Consciousness cannot be explained by objects of consciousness.

I am in the world as a body. I see my body. If I could see my functioning brain, I would see what happens in my brain when I look at its functioning. I would see my seeing process as it appears to me in the world. But what I would see would not explain my seeing it.

Consciousness does not reside in any place or structure of the material world, not even in the brain.

My body is a material object that I meet in the world. My head is part of my body. My brain is an organ inside my head, and its physiology is connected to the way I experience the world.

There are no thoughts in my head. My brain does not think.

Because all being is related to consciousness, consciousness cannot be a property of matter or any other being.

We live in a material world, we explore it, and at some point we may think that it is all there is, and that by exploring the structure of matter we shall in the end also explain why we exist. However, the world is part of the structure of existence, and our existence explains the being of the world, not vice versa.

When I want to understand my existence. I start to explore what is already in front of me: the world I am living in. But I cannot understand existence or the world if I do not see the totality: my temporal being in the world that is the material condition of my existence.

Even if all the objects of our experience were material, matter itself would not be essential, but experiencing the material reality.

The structure of my existence is such that the objects I meet in the world are the natural objects of my sight. If I want to see the structure itself, I must look closer. But I do not see myself, and my existence is not an object that I can look at.

Existence must realize itself, and it can realize itself only in the form of its inner logic. Nature is one of the necessary forms of realizing existence. Nature in turn has its own inner logic, the expression of which are the necessary structures that we call laws of nature.

Laws of nature do not explain anything. Scientists find laws of nature and find that nature behaves according to these laws.

Even if we found all laws of nature, and everything happened according to these laws, it would still be a total mystery that things happen in the way they happen.

Science cannot explain why reality is such as it is. It only illuminates the landscape so that we can see the inner structure of phenomena, their connections to laws of nature.

When we see the structure of a phenomenon, we understand and master it better, and it does not bother us as much as before. We call this sometimes explaining, but it is not, of course, an explanation of the being of the phenomenon.

The explanation of a phenomenon is not in its structure or in other phenomena, but in our existence, in the realization of which it takes part.

The explanation of the phenomenon that the Sun rises every morning could be a figure of the solar system and the description of all laws of nature. When we see the totality to which a phenomenon belongs, we feel that we have explained it and that it now belongs to the phenomena that we understand. But if we want to know why the solar system exists, we must describe a larger totality and, in the end, the whole universe. And the explanation of the being of the universe is not in the universe but in us who try to explain the world and understand our existence.

The universe is a material organism that realizes all forms of consciousness as an endless flow of time. My body is an organic part of the universe, and it realizes the form of consciousness which expresses itself at present.

The universe realizes my eternal existence. That is why the Sun rises.

The world is one of the basic structures of my existence. It exists because I exist.

It is an absurd idea that there would be a world, but I would not exist.

The world is more than I can perceive or understand, but it is nevertheless only for me.

There are events that are outside of all experience. But although they are outside of experience, they presuppose an experience outside of which they are.

Although probably nobody was in place to witness the birth of the Sun, it was still born in a way that can be described in principle. But this does not mean that the world does not presuppose consciousness, because even if the Sun was born outside of consciousness, it was born to the world in which I exist, and it is not meaningful to say that it could have been born even if I did not exist.

An object can be even if it does not appear to me, but not independent of my existence.

I could think that if a hundred years ago something else had happened than what really happened, I would not be born and consequently I would not exist now. But even if I could imagine a world that is different from the one we live in, I cannot imagine a world in which I would not be some individual at present.

I could think that I exist only because there happened to evolve life on Earth. But it is, of course, vice versa: there ”happened” to evolve life on Earth because I exist.

I do not exist because my heart beats, but my heart beats because I exist.

If Earth would blow up tomorrow, this incident would define some details of my existence but would not destroy my existence and its endlessness.

The subject is not a being that can be or not be. It is the condition of the being of all objects and phenomena. All that there is, is in relation to me.

If I did not exist, there would be nothing. Perhaps no one has yet understood this simple sentence and all its consequences.

3. The Others

Children are playing. One of them gets an idea. ”What if I were you?” ”Perhaps you are”, the other says.

Others are series of experiences, individuals.

Other individuals are related to the individual that I am at present. If I did not exist, there would be no others either.

The other is the other member of a relation which has me as one member. And because the relation is symmetrical, I am also the other. So I am an other to myself.

I am in temporal and spatial relation to others.

The others are in the world, but also in my past or future.

Consciousness is my consciousness. It is a flow of experiences, changing of the present to a new present. Also the experiences of others belong to this flow, but because they are not my present experiences, they must be experiences that I have had in the past or experiences that I shall have in the future.

I have this feeling and I know that also others have feelings. A feeling is however something that is present in the double meaning of the word as 'here' and 'now', the content of my existence as I am experiencing it. It is not meaningful to speak of a feeling that I am not feeling. But because the feelings that I meet in the world in others are not in the same way present as my present feeling is, they can only be feelings that I have had or shall have in those ”places” in time where others are.

If I did not experience the experiences of the others, there would be experiences without experiencing.

It is impossible to think of an experience which exists but which I do not experience.

An experience that I do not experience is a being that is not.

I am an individual that is composed of the experiences between my birth an death, that is, the experiences to which my present experience has a memory relation or which have a memory relation to my present experience. Other individuals are composed of experiences before my birth or after my death, that is, experiences to which my experiences have no memory relation and which have no memory relation to my experiences.

Existence realizes itself by fragments of time that are temporally and spatially related to each other.

That I am here and now, is a timeless truth. The present is a unique content mediated by the world, which, as it changes to another unique content, constitutes, mediated by memory, the unique series of presences that we call the individual. Individuals are series of experiences that, separated from each other by the loss of memory we call death, change to each other constituting on one hand the endless series of presences we call time, and on the other hand, as they meet each other and themselves as material objects in space, that totality of events that we call the universe.

I meet myself in the others. This is not a metaphor.

When I meet an other, I meet a moment in the endless series of moments, at the present moment of which I meet the other, and at a past or future moment of which I have been or shall be the one who meets me at the same meeting event.

A and B see each other simultaneously in their common time in their common world. But in the time that connects these two experiences to each other as present experiences, one happens before the other.

The other whom I meet am I who meets an other: me.

I know that others have experiences and I know that the other is an I, but something prevents me from seeing what our grammar expresses: the I whom I meet am I.

In these sentences 'I' does not refer to an individual but to the subject. This way of using the word intends to express the view that there is only one subject, and that the subject is always that which I am here and now.

When I speak to an other, 'I' refers to the individual that I am, and 'you' refers to another individual. That there is only one subject, has no expression in ordinary language.

That only I exist, does not mean that the others do not exist. 'I' and 'the other' refer to the same point, but this identity realizes itself only through death. In life it does not express itself. When I live with others, the others are only others.

The word 'I' has two meanings: 'the subject which has these experiences' and 'the individual that has these experiences'. When I speak, these meanings overlap so that I speak simultaneously as an individual and as a timeless subject. When someone else speaks, I think this someone is an individual that is foreign to me and whose inner world is closed from me, and I do not see that 'I' really refers to one point only: the present that changes its content and meets its past or future in the world, and to the past or future of which 'I' can therefore also refer.

When I use language I presuppose that there are in the world other individuals who understand me. However, language does not easily express the deeper meaning of the existence of others: my temporal relation to them.

If we try, using language, to get closer to the deepest meaning of our existence, language comes to its frontiers illuminating reality with its paradoxes.

Only by traveling outside of language can we see into the nucleus of existence.

When I speak, I speak to others, and therefore I speak of things that are common to us in the world, and of myself as an individual, in relation to others. This is the region of language. But only a slight move, a change of perspective, opens up a new land, where things that are common to us become private, a land which therefore stays outside of language. Seeing this land reveals the deep union that has always been between us, and when walking on this land we understand, for the first time, the meaning of our existence.

We have asked who the others are. We have also asked what will be after death and what was before birth. The answer to both questions is the same: after my death I shall be an other and before my birth I was an other.

The thought that the other whom I meet am I, is, when thoroughly understood, clear but embarrassing.

The existence of others is self-evident for us, because it belongs to the basic structures of our existence. We do not usually think what a strange phenomenon it is.

When we communicate with others, we do not understand who they are. But we shall perhaps understand it some day in the silence of a forest, when our thoughts decide to start conquering their frontiers.

Someone got an insight once that Earth is a sphere, and now we all understand it, although our senses tell us something else. In the same way the mysteries of death and otherness will be solved: everything just settles down and reality reveals to us its ”geometrical” form, its symmetry.

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If I did not exist, there would be nothing. But this is a paradoxical statement and has deep consequences. For it is clear that when I die, the world does not end. That is, when I die as an individual. But I think we use the word ‘I’ in two ways: (1) the person who has these experiences, and (2) the subject that has these experiences. And the subject does not die but moves from individual to individual. So there is only one subject that is eternal and guarantees that there is always something, because the subject, my existence, has to be in the world in order to be at all.

The question “Why is there something instead of nothing” is often regarded as a pseudo question, especially by materialistically oriented scientists. In a way they are right, because ‘non-being’ is really a self-contradictory concept, but the reason for its absurdity is perhaps not what they think.

The clue is the subject, the ‘I’, for whom everything is. Being without a standpoint would be absurd. Although there are many things in the world which no one has seen or even thought of, they are there ontologically in relation to a subject, the one that has experiences here and now, the one that is present in the double sense of ‘here’ and ‘now’.

I am, and my non-being is unthinkable and therefore impossible. So I am eternally, because time belongs to my being in a fundamental way. Time is the nucleus of being, originally of my being and secondarily of the being of the world or universe, where it loses its original structure of present, past and future and shows itself as the space-time of physics. Originally time is constant changing of the present mode of being of ‘is’ for the past mode of being of ‘was’ and the creation of a new present in the flow of experiences heading towards the future.

Are there any grounds for the argument that my non-being is impossible? It is a strong statement, and looks like a religious thesis. I can only say that for me it is a clear and powerful idea, an insight rather than the result of logical reasoning. But it is consistent, too.

So my existence is causa sui, and the way I exist, or must exist, and in what kind of a universe I can exist, and what in general is the basic structure of existence, demands thinking that goes beyond this reasoning. My guess is that the special way we exist is somehow connected to seeking transparency of being or, as Hegel put it, self-consciousness of the Absolute. But, someone may ask, how is the existence of other subjects related to all this? Philosophy is full of exciting questions.

Why do I ask about my being? Perhaps it is because I see others die, and I understand that I shall also die. And when I am dead, I am not, and I have never been, because the past is also a mode of being. This insight of my future non-being brings up the concepts of being and non-being and the question “Why is there being?” If I did not know that I shall die, I would not have the concepts of being and non-being in the general sense. So for a self-conscious being the question of being and non-being is not meaningless. On the contrary, an intolerable paradox of existence strikes existence itself, and I have tried to sketch some general ideas for resolving that paradox.

Someone may think that there is no paradox: now I am and then I am not. But although being is temporal, being and non-being do not “happen” in time. Therefore there is a real contradiction between those two ”concepts”. One of them must go. And it is not difficult to guess which one.

From the logical point of view the sentence “There is being” is a tautology, and the sentence “There is non-being” is a contradiction. Our grammar tells us the same: being is, and non-being is not. Our grammar is wiser than philosophers.

But then again, it is not easy for us to understand the deep existential consequences of this simple grammar.

My view is that science has trouble with consciousness because it is committed to a false monistic ontology. It assumes that there is one isolated universe where all phenomena are on the same level of being. Furthermore, it assumes that complex phenomena can be explained by the simple, basic components of physics. And what is the key point in this context, it assumes that the phenomena of consciousness can in principle be explained by biological and finally physical principles.

But the universe is not an isolated phenomenon. It is one member of the relation whose other member is the subject, the 'I' that is ”in the universe”. So I have a relation to the universe, and that relation we call consciousness. We cannot break that relation so that the relation itself would come part of the universe. This means that there is a primordial gap between the world of physics and consciousness. Those two phenomena are not on the same ontological level. However, there is a correlation between the two, and it is this correlation that should be the object of scientific inquiry, not ”explaining” consciousness by biology, which is impossible and will stay as such.

All being is my being or belongs to the necessary conditions of my being.

I am, and there is no such phenomenon as non-being. Non-being is a pseudo concept. It is self-contradictory, unthinkable, and does not refer to anything.

One of the necessary conditions of my being is that I am related to a set of objects we call the world or universe. This being related we call consciousness in the broad sense , including all experiences of any subject.

Consciousness is essentially temporal and is the source of time in all its manifestations, including the space-time of physics.

Consciousness is not the same as subjectivity. It is the manifold of various subjective forms by which we are related to the world, whereas subjectivity can be thought of as the point without content along which the world is coordinated, to use Wittgenstein's expression.

The subject, or subjectivity, or the 'I', is eternal, because being, as my being, is temporal and has no opposite.

So, as the subject I am eternal. I may have had a beginning, and in fact this must be the case, but I shall never have my last experience, as the subject. But as an individual, of course, I was born and I shall die. So the word 'I' has two meanings: (1) ”the subject that has these experiences” and (2) ”the individual that has these experiences”.

My being consists of successive experiences that are directed towards the world and towards my past experiences building a synthesis of both. This way we learn and grow as individuals. But if I do not have a relation to my past experiences, I am dead and just born. So death is not the end. Dying is forgetting.

So memory defines an individual.

The world consists of objects and other individuals. Other individuals are the deepest meaning of the world and are manifestations of the one and only subject whose one manifestation I am. The objects of the world, and I as an individual body, are material because the other individuals must be material and spatio-temporal objects in order to have a concrete relation to me.

Now we see that the world, as the world of others, divides reality into two ontological levels: the material world and consciousness. I see the others as material bodies but also individual conscious subjects, although their experiences are foreign to me. I can also look at my brain as I think and see my thinking process ”online”, like in a mirror, on the material level.

Now we can speculate a bit, and suggest that perhaps reality is, in order to be causa sui and transparent to itself, a reflexive relation of me to myself, because ”I am” is the only truth that needs no explanation. So, because every other object of the world that I am related to, needs an explanation and remains a mystery even after all explanations, the deepest meaning of the world must be myself, because I am causa sui. This is what I mean when I say that there is only one subject and use the phrase 'the subject'. I am the subject now. You are the subject in my future or in my past. I admit that this is embarrassing, but all the same, this seems to be the only hypothesis that solves the problem of foreign experiences, saying that they are not really foreign but my own experiences, which is in accordance with the concept and idea of experience.

This means that I, as the subject, have wandered and will wander through all individual forms of consciousness, in an unknown order, and this wandering has no end. All experiences are my experiences. So this all leads to a kind of solipsism and a kind of transmigration theory, both considered as mortal sins among philosophers, but I think my view is a sophisticated combination of both, reconciling the sins.

I see people die, and I understand that I shall also die. Nevertheless, I find it impossible to think of my non-being, because if I did not exist, there would be nothing: no world, no time, no past, including the fact that I am just now writing these sentences.

Besides, we do not experience our death, we only experience something before death and perhaps something after death.

The life of an individual cannot be eternal, whereas my existence as the experiencing subject has no end. The difference between these two levels of subjectivity is essential, leading to a modified concept of transmigration and a new way of understanding time.

Although the universe is full of events that no consciousness is witnessing, all these events are for a consciousness, namely for the consciousness that is just now experiencing just these experiences at precisely this place in the world, although those events do not belong to its sphere of experience. So also the part of reality which is unreachable for consciousness, presupposes a consciousness for which it is unreachable.

As I see it, the relation of consciousness to the material world is also ontological. The world, or universe, consists of objects and is itself an objective totality. However, objects are not Kantian 'Dinge an sich' but members of the subject-object relation. The being of the world depends on the being of the subject and vice versa. There is no world without the subject and no conscious, experiencing subject without the world.

Now we can ask, which one is more fundamental, consciousness or the material world, which one is the “primus motor”. It is my strong view that it is the subject, the “I am”, the one which defines the meaning of being in general.

I am not saying that consciousness has no material basis, but I am asking what is the ontological relation of consciousness to its basis.

These thoughts may lead to some metaphysical speculations.

My being is being in the world.

My being is being related to the world, and there are two participants in this relation: on one hand I, the subject, and on the other hand the world, or transcendence.

My relation to the world is called consciousness or immanence.

Because I am related to the world, I have to be in the world, and so I have to belong to transcendence, too. Therefore I must have a body by which I am related to the world.

So my being realizes itself in my relation to the world, and because this relation is corporeal, every state of immanence or consciousness has, as its counterpart, a unique totality of events in my body. However, immanence and transcendence must always be kept conceptually separated from each other, and no kind of reduction is possible.

My body is a kind of mirror image of my consciousness: when I move my hand (an experience), my hand moves (an event in the world), or when I think of something, something happens in my brain. The same event shows itself on the immanent level and on the transcendent level, in consciousness and in the material world.

Some cognition scientists think that the phenomena of consciousness can be reduced to brain events in the same way as brain events can be reduced to the basic components of physics. They ask how the brain produces consciousness. This question has proved to be a difficult one, and the reason for that is very clear: the brain does not produce consciousness, so there is no problem. The task of science is only to describe the observed correlations.

Matter, the material world and the universe, as objective phenomena, are just for their objective nature participants of the subject-object relation. We cannot get rid of the subject. It is there in all research concerning the totality of being, either explicitly or implicitly, not only as a reflection of matter, not only as an emergent property of matter, but as the starting point. Science has admittedly made amazing progress by ”bracketing out” consciousness, but at the same time the ontological status of consciousness has been left unclear, which shows itself for example just in this obsession to reduce consciousness to brain events.

The problem for science or philosophy is not how the brain creates thoughts, because the question is not meaningful. The task for science is to describe and clarify the correlations between thoughts and brain events. The philosophical problem is to understand why the brain is needed for thinking, that is, what is the role of the material world in the being of the subject. For we are living in the same and only world that shows itself as an object for us, and it is just this reflexive relation that causes the split into mind and matter, thoughts and brain events. What this common world of ours is in its deepest meaning and why it divides us in this way, will perhaps not become clear to us before we understand in a profound way the existence of other subjects and the meaning of intersubjectivity.

I am not saying that consciousness has no material basis, but I am asking what is the ontological relation of consciousness to its basis.

I am a subject and I meet myself as an object in the world. From this meeting there appears an irreducible dualism between my consciousness and my body. My thinking reflects itself as brain events in the same way as my movements repeat themselves in the mirror image. In this case, however, the mirror with its reflections is already there in the movement as its inner structure.

We could perhaps say a bit poetically that the universe has not created consciousness but consciousness has created the universe for itself to live in. However, this does not mean that there is a causal relation between the two, but it means that consciousness is ontologically more fundamental than the material world, which together with temporality constitutes the basic structure of being. When we speak about this structure, for example about the changing world, we already presuppose a relation to the one who is speaking, the subject, and it is not meaningful to speak about the world or about time without this relation, although it is not always expressed. If I did not exist, there would be nothing. Therefore the subject is eternal.

We can conclude from what was said above that also time is a concept that belongs to the sphere of subjectivity. It is the core structure of consciousness and being in general, a phenomenon where the present is constantly changing to the past and a new present is created in the flow of experiences heading towards the future. Instead of this, as a component of the space-time of physics time is seen from a kind of eternal perspective, so that the present, the past and the future are eliminated or ”bracketed off”. This is a valid construction and as part of the theory it does what is needed. The physicist however misunderstands the place of consciousness in the totality of being if he/she sees the experiences of presence and flow of time as some kind of illusions or experiences created by our own restrictions, and tries to explain them by the time concept of physics and the functioning of our brain. This pseudo problem has sometimes been in some physicists' minds in their popular writings. It is clear, however, that the basic structures of consciousness cannot be explained by the objects of consciousness, however objective and ”Dinge an sich” they may be.

Here the word 'subject' does not mean an individual, empirical ”I” but, as was said above, the uneliminable precondition of all being, the fact that everything is in relation to me, or that the world is my world, to use Ludwig Wittgenstein's phrase.

Although the universe is full of events that no consciousness is witnessing, all these events are for a consciousness, namely for the consciousness that is just now experiencing just these experiences at precisely this spot in the world, although those events do not belong to its sphere of experience. So also the part of reality which is unreachable for consciousness, presupposes a consciousness for which it is unreachable.

The task of philosophy is ambitious: it wants to understand everything. To start this, it has to abandon all ontologies that disturb clear thinking, from materialism to spiritualism, and start from what is self-evident and certain and whose opposite cannot be thought of: I am. The word 'I' has, as was said before, two meanings: on one hand it refers to an individual, on the other hand to the subject which goes through the experiences of all individuals. It is in this latter sense that the sentence ”I am” is always true and therefore the natural starting point of philosophy, for my being is the necessary condition of all being and consequently the place where we must start searching the meaning of all being.

The most beautiful grapes of the Copernican revolution are perhaps still ripening.

When I meet someone, I meet a subject who has experiences, but I have no access to those experiences in the way they are experienced by the other. The experiences of the other are present for the other but absent for me, because as an individual I cannot have the experiences of another individual. I can only meet something which is not only the physiological, material organism we call 'body' but also the series of inner experiences we call 'mind' but which is foreign to me in the other. So the other has its own immanence, its mind, which no one else can see, and its transcendence, its body, which is accessible to all of us. But the mind is not “in” the body, and the body does not “have” a mind, and what is also important, the organism, for example the brain, does not produce thoughts or anything else that belongs to the sphere of the mind. In fact the body and the mind are one and the same thing considered from two ontological levels: from immanent and transcendent points of view. But although these two levels are manifestations of the same phenomenon, there is no bridge between them: we cannot explain one by the other because the basic concepts are incompatible. There are only correlations between them, and therefore the mind-body problem is not, for example, a problem of how we could reduce the phenomena of consciousness to brain events, but rather a problem of how we could translate mental and bodily events into each other.

This relation between body and mind becomes still more clear if I imagine observing my brain events at the same time as I am thinking of something: I can see my thinking process in real time in my brain and see the correlations like a moving picture of myself in a mirror, although the correlations are much more complex than in the case of a mirror image.

The question remains: why are we divided into minds and bodies? The answer lies in the existence of others. The others must be material in order to be in relation to me, and experiencing subjects in order to be on the same level of being as I am. That is the very idea of the other.

There is something because I am. This was the basic insight of Descartes, and it also “explains” why there is necessarily something rather than nothing if we do not interpret the 'I' as an empirical, individual subject but the transcendental subject which is timeless. This is how I see the problem, which is, in my view, a proper philosophical problem, not a pseudo question at all, although many scientists see it that way.

I am conscious, by definition. The others are conscious, by definition, just because they are others. I have a relation to the others, and this relation realizes itself by the material world, including instruments like hammers and computers which, by definition, are not conscious.

Existence = my existence, the word 'I' denoting not the individual, empirical subject, e.g. 'Markku Tamminen', but the transcendental subject which is the precondition of all being.

That I am, in this sense, needs no explaining.

Therefore, existence needs no explaining.

I think the reason why it is so difficult to explain or define consciousness is that we see it as a phenomenon among other phenomena. But phenomena present themselves to the subject (i.e. to me, to us) and consciousness is the way phenomena present themselves to us. Therefore consciousness is ontologically closer to us than other phenomena, and there is no conceptual bridge between consciousness and the material world, which means that consciousness cannot be explained or defined by scientific concepts. There are only correlations between those two levels of being.

I would say that the problem of consciousness is not difficult, if it is a problem at all. Even Descartes had a hunch of this, although he interpreted consciousness as substance, which led him astray. Consciousness is the starting point of philosophy because it is the precondition of all being, and by studying the structure of consciousness we will get closer to the meaning of the world, matter and time, for example. This is, of course, a strong ontological view and differs very much from the present main stream of thought among scientists.

I am not claiming that all being is being perceived, because that would be silly. There is plenty of being that is never perceived, but it is never perceived from a standpoint of a subject, because it is impossible (for me, at least) to imagine a world that no one has ever experienced or will ever experience. So the subject-object relation is in the nucleus of reality.

Immanence points towards transcendence. The material world, or universe, is transcendent, but it is transcendent for immanence, from the standpoint of a subject.

If consciousness were a property of the brain, or matter in general, as many scientists think, then that property should be found somewhere in the brain. But I cannot find it in my brain or other people's brains.

Suppose you study your brain as you think of something. Your state of consciousness is A, in the sense of an immediate content of experience. The state of your brain is B, physiologically described, and there is a correlation between A and B. In fact A and B are one and the same thing described with two different languages or coordinate systems. A is ontologically closer than B. When we speak of properties or states of the brain, we must, in my opinion, stay within the physiological level. That there could emerge a new property called consciousness, would sound strange to me, whereas the natural view, in my opinion, is that consciousness is there already, and the brain is the organ (in the sense of an instrument) of consciousness.

Being is not being perceived. Being is being perceived or not perceived by a subject and the subject's perceiving or not-perceiving that we call consciousness. We cannot get rid of the subject-object relation. If we remove the subject, also the object vanishes. The object may be independent of an individual subject and relatively independent of any subject, but it must be kept in mind that independence is also a relation and requires something of which an object is independent, for example, as Wittgenstein wrote in Tractatus, a point along which the world is coordinated.

There is a point of view that is there already, a point of view from which the world is an independent phenomenon. This may seem paradoxical at first sight, but I think it is consistent. And now we are back in the core of transcendental idealism. It is no use, however, to criticize my view against the esse est percipi argument, because I do not share that argument. But it is true that in my view there cannot be a world without experiencing.

There is plenty of being that is not within the experiential field, but it is in the world that is inhabited, i.e. there is a point of view to the world. A transcendent object is an object all the same, and requires a subject of some sort to maintain the subject-object relation.

If there is a world, there is at least one subject for which the world has meaning. The subject is conscious of the world, and its consciousness consists of meanings concerning the world. But if there is no subject, there is nothing, and nothingness is an absurd and self-contradictory ”concept”. That is why subjectivity is the precondition of all being. I know that from the existence of the world the being of subjectivity does not logically follow, and from the lack of subjectivity nothingness does not logically follow, but I think that instead of logic the question is about seeing reality in proper light.

The objects of the world are always beyond our immediate experience although we have relations to them. That is why they are transcendent. There is always something left that we do not understand in them, and that is why we keep studying them. But in spite of this, the subject-object relation remains, although everybody does not accept this view, which for me is almost as obvious as the cogito was for Descartes, an insight so self-evident, but so difficult to formulate that it is regarded as a great invention.

Perhaps one of the strongest arguments against my position is this: Nowadays we have a scientific view of the universe as a whole called cosmology. According to its present theories it is physically and logically possible that the universe could have been totally different from what it actually is, for example such that there would not be a single experiencing subject. And it is a pure chance that the universe is such as it is, with all its mice and men. But although the concept of chance can be formulated mathematically in modern physics, it is nevertheless a very problematic concept. To say my strong opinion: I am not here by chance. It may or may not be the case that my being just this person here and now is a chance, but it surely is not a chance that there is the experience of 'I am'. But how can I prove it? How could Descartes prove that "I am" is true? I think that more than being a question of proof it is a question of self-evidence, like in the case of Descartes. But I must confess that it does not seem to be so self-evident to the majority of people, perhaps because they are not used to reflective thinking.

Time, or temporality, is one of the basic ontological structures of consciousness, and therefore goes through all the other components of consciousness. The origin of time is consciousness, and physical time cannot be understood without referring to the phenomenological time-consciousness, or consciousness as temporality. In physics time has in fact been impoverished by removing the basic concepts of present, past and future.

If we try to imagine a world without subjects, we look at the world and see a part of the world where there are no subjects, and then we apply that situation to the whole universe. In that way we make a concept of a subjectless universe. But that is an abstraction, because we are not, for obvious reasons, inside that universe. I cannot see how we can say that such a universe exists or that it does not exist. It vanishes in the air, loses all logic and looks like an absurdity to me.

What I think is that consciousness is the primus motor of the universe, something which strives towards the transparency of reality, or makes the universe evolve towards its transparency for itself. Therefore consciousness is always already there and is the precondition of all being.

It is true that the body and consciousness are connected, but the body is still a transcendent object for consciousness. I can see my body in the same way as I can see other material objects. I would say there is a one-to-one correlation between those two levels of being.

Material things do not exist in consciousness but are observed through consciousness, and are also unobserved by consciousness, having a relationship with the subject in both cases.

Of course there was no consciousness before life, but what I am arguing is that there cannot be a universe with no subjects at all, any time, any place, from the point of view of which the world is experienced, wondered at and given meaning to, and that subjectivity is the precondition of any universe whatsoever, the primus motor for the very existence of a universe. Reality is not blind. We are there already.

Although there was no consciousness in the universe in the early stages of its evolution, the universe may all the time have been in the process of creating it, which seems to be a big process and makes us almost crazy as we are looking at it. It must be noticed that there may also be so called formal causes for things, to remember the classifications of Aristotle, though they are not very popular among modern philosophers and especially scientists. It may be the case that causal relations are only subordinate to the formal causes when we think of the universe as a whole. What I think would be the "form" or idea, in the Platonic sense, could be, for example, self-consciousness in the Hegelian sense, Reality which would be transparent to itself. But for example Sartre wrote that Hegel was too optimistic in his scenarios.

If by the world we mean the one and only universe there is, then the following syllogism should be valid:

1. To speak about the world, you must be in the world.
2. You cannot be in a world with no subjects.
3. Therefore you cannot say anything about a world with no subjects, not even that such a world is possible or impossible.

So, a world without subjects vanishes away, loses all logic, and the "concept" of it becomes an absurdity when we try to think about it. But what can we infer from a reductio ad absurdum?

By the universe I do not mean a historical part of the universe but the whole of space-time with all its inhabitants, whether they are there or not. And I say that it is absurd to speak of a universe where they are not there. This is connected to my views of the primordial status of existence in the sense of Heidegger's Dasein and the impossibility to break the subject-object relation even in the case of transcendent objects.

To say it in another way: If there were any logic at all in the "concept" of a universe without subjects, that logic should come from inside that universe (because it is the one and only universe we are living in, only different!). But there is nothing from which that logic could come, because logic, in my opinion, belongs to the sphere of consciousness or subjectivity and the relation of consciousness towards the world. Or has logic some kind of a Platonic status, being a collection of ideas in a world of its own?

Let us suppose that we are in a certain kind of a world, are part of it at the same time as we are conscious of it. The world means here the universe as a whole, it past, present and future, the space-time with its inhabitants, which are there as we know. Now the question is, whether there is a possible world, in the sense of Leibniz, where nobody is judging if it is the best possible world. Is it logically possible? Is it physically possible? Remember that it is the one and only world there is, there are not many worlds, because that was our presumption. To be honest, I do not believe that there are possible worlds at all, in the sense of physically possible. In that sense I am a determinist. And this means, as I have said, that consciousness is a key "property" of the world we live in, realizing the subject-object relation. I am arguing that this is the essential structure of any world whatsoever, all worlds that are possible, if there is more than one possible world, which I doubt. Consciousness is in the center of existence, ontologically closest to us, and it needs no explanation for itself by the material world, which belongs to its existential structures, together with temporality, and it is rather the being of the material world and matter which needs explanation or understanding. And all this is closely connected with the being of Others.

About possible worlds: The sentence "It is possible that there are no people in the world" is meaningful because we know what people are like. The sentence "It is possible that there is no life in the world" is meaningful because we know what life is like. But the sentence "It is possible that there are no subjects in the world" is meaningless because the subject is not an object or entity at all. It has no properties, being only, as Wittgenstein says in Tractatus, a point along which the world is coordinated. Any description of any possible world presupposes the subject in this sense, but it cannot be included in the description, because only entities with known properties can be included in it. This is why the subject is always there already as a precondition of any possible world we can imagine.

But there seems to be a paradox here. It is meaningful to say that a world without life is possible, but it is meaningless to say that a world without subjects is possible. Is it possible that there is subjectivity without life? I think not, but that is a question of physical possibilities and necessities, which is a scientific problem, not philosophical.

My general ontological hypothesis is that experience and the material world are the same thing seen from the immanent and transcendent points of view.

So I am in the world as my body. And in this world I am an experiencing subject. Now if we look at the universe as a whole, the one and only universe there is (this is the definition of the universe), the epistemological and ontological issues overlap. We cannot jump off from the world even in imagination, because it is the only world there is, and all the worlds we can imagine must contain something in common. This common feature is subjectivity, which defines the logic of all possible worlds, the possibility of which can only be secured by the concepts of our own actual world.

Although the universe was subjectless right after the big bang, it is not, and I think it cannot be, subjectless during the whole of space-time, be it finite or infinite. And as I have said, I think subjectivity is the primus motor of the whole universe.

I think there is only one subject with no properties or spatiotemporal locations. The subject is a point of view to the world, and this point of view consists of successive experiences of the world and usually also experiences of previous experiences. The finite chain of experiences that consists of experiences connected together by experiencing previous experiences, is memory. Memory defines an individual. When the present experience no longer has any connection to earlier experiences, the individual is dead. But time goes on, and temporal succession is in fact the only thing that defines subjectivity as such. As such it is tabula rasa, the point or limit in the sense of Wittgenstein, a pure presence without experiential content or internal properties.

My view is some sort of a sophisticated combination of solipsism and a modified transmigration theory which, when combined with a theory of others, makes a unified and plausible world view.

It was Lady Subject who invited Mr. World to dance. For dance is what it is all about: life, existence, being there in the world, not just an abstraction of the world or universe in itself. The being of the world presupposes the being of the subject, and the being of the subject presupposes the being of the world, and the being of the world makes it possible for us to be there. To dance.

The universe as a whole, seen from the point of view of eternity, as it is seen in modern cosmology, must have a cause or reason for its being, or then it is causa sui. I think the subject is causa sui and the formal cause, in the sense of Aristotle, for the being of the universe.

The universe, seen as a whole, has coordinates in space-time. This is called the history of the universe. And in history there are subjects and objects.

I would say that the subject is causa sui and the universe or nature in itself is not, and needs a cause for its being. And this cause, as I have tried to say, perhaps not very unambiguously, is the subject, which itself needs no cause for its being, but is the formal cause (Aristotle's causa formalis) for the being of the world or the universe or the totality of nature. This view probably differs a lot from many others, because I think, like Wittgenstein, that the subject does not belong to the world, but is like a point along which the world is coordinated, or a "limit of the world".

Consciousness is original, being always there already, as the precondition of all being, but it is not self-existent, because its being presupposes the being of the world and vice versa. Epistemologically it constitutes the way we see things and think of things, in the Kantian sense, and ontologically it constitutes the "things in themselves" in the sense of being the causa formalis of the totality of nature.

I understand that transcendent God transcends immanence by being somewhere beyond or above nature, whereas the transcendental subject transcends empirical consciousness by being "behind" it, as the precondition of its being. We are it, in addition to being empirical subjects.

Of course it is possible to argue that subjects are part of nature, or that God is nature itself, but I do not think so. I am in nature only as my body, not as the transcendental subject, and not even as the empirical consciousness that I am. The transcendental subject is a point of view to the world, and my empirical consciousness is the way the world appears or presents itself to me as I am this peculiar individual here and now.

This fundamental status of the transcendental subject in the center of reality has important metaphysical consequences. Material organisms die, and with them the empirical subjects the being of which those organisms have made possible. But the transcendental subject does not die, because it is not committed to any material structure. It adopts all possible empirical modes of existence, and leaves them when it is time to do so. We are one, and we are eternal.

The pantheistic approach is beautiful, and I have always thought that its views coincide with mine, but now I find that it lacks the most important principle we need: the unity of subjectivity, which makes us eternal though not immortal as individuals.

I speak about the unity of subjectivity. I do not know if it is the proper word, but I mean something which connects subjective experiences so that there is only one present experience wandering through the world and adopting all possible contents of consciousness. This is what I think of eternity.

Two ways of seeing the the subject-world relationship:

1. Consciousness is a reflexive relation of the material world to itself. This is the materialistic point of view, and the reflexive relation gets interpreted as a property of matter.
2. The material world is a reflexive relation of the transcendental subject to itself.

I would say the second alternative is more plausible.

I think "consciousness without an object" would vanish into nothingness. In fact it would be precisely the transcendental subject, a point of view to the world without any properties, a point along which the world is coordinated, to remind of Wittgenstein again. But what I mean by consciousness, even prereflective, is something that has some sort of content, and it can get its content only from the world. So, in my view, 'subjectivity' and 'consciousness' have different meanings.

Although I do not believe in transcendent God or my personal rebirth, I would still say this: If, as I think, the subject and the world "dance together", then if my death means that I cease to exist for good, also the world would cease to exist for good. But because, obviously, my death does not mean the end of the world, I will necessarily be born as another individual, probably with no memories of my present life. Perhaps I am such "another" individual just now. This is what I meant by the unity of subjectivity.

Consciousness needs the material world for its being, because the transcendental subject that lies "behind" it, has no properties, being only a point of view to the world.

The view of the brain generating consciousness and consciousness being a property of matter or the brain is very strange and implausible from my standpoint.

My view is that the transcendental subject, being only a point of view to the world without inner properties, presupposes the being of the world and is always related to the world, and the way the world appears to the subject, is what we mean by consciousness.

Why do we need the concept of the transcendental subject? This is a good question, and the answer is connected with the most difficult existential questions we meet: death and the being of others. So what I understand by the transcendental subject is not so much a matter of epistemological issues but our deepest ontological and existential problems.

From the point of view of a materialistic and monistic ontology it is certainly very natural to think that matter, in the course of its evolution, generates consciousness as a property of the brain. But I think it only generates the material counterpart of consciousness, which makes it possible for the subject to exist, to be in relation to the world. The brain or organism is sort of a mirror of consciousness and vice versa, and consciousness is on a different ontological level, closer to us than the material world. And it is closer in a fundamental way, not just in terms of “degrees of closeness”. So this leads to ontological dualism.

Consciousness is not in the brain or any other place. Imagine if your eyes were at a distance of ten meters from your body, including your brain of course, connected to your brain with nerve cables. If you would look at your body now, from far away, would you still say that your mind is in your brain or body?

I would say that consciousness is the subject's way of being in the world or having a relation to the world by means of a material organism which functions as its substrate. But the subject itself has no inner properties, only consciousness as such, which is its way of being. So we come to a regional ontology, where there is one way of describing material things, and another way of describing phenomena of consciousness. Therefore, for example, concepts like "brain-mind" cannot be used to describe one unified field of research using the same scientific language for both brain and mind. Only the correlations between those two ontological levels can be described, and that is what the discipline called physiological psychology or cognition science should keep in mind.

I think with Wittgenstein that the subject is a "limit of the world" or a point along which the world is coordinated. It makes sense to me.

My brain makes my thinking possible, but my brain does not think. I think with my brain in the same way as I see with my eyes. The brain is the organ of thinking, but in the sense of an instrument. And what is this 'I'? It is the subject, and it is not the brain or "in" the brain.

To a materialist:

So we have totally opposite views on this: you say the whole organism is a subject, I say the subject has nothing to do with an organism except that it needs it for its being. You say my view of the subject makes no sense, and I say your view of the subject as a material organism makes no sense. How is it possible that two rationally thinking people are so far away from each other in the way they see reality?

There is only one transcendental subject and its various ways of being related to the world, and these ways of being in the world is what we call consciousness.

My view is not substance dualism, because consciousness is not substance, Descartes was wrong on this. Consciousness consists of intentional relations, meanings, qualia and so on, but it is not any kind of spiritual substance. However, it is on a different ontological level than the material organism.

I have used the terms 'individual' or 'empirical' subject to mean the way the subject is related to the world in each case. How the identity of an individual gets constituted is another question and from my point of view not an easy one. I guess from the materialistic perspective it may be easier.

A sidekick into language: Proper names denote individual or empirical subjects, but the word 'I' denotes both empirical subjects and the transcendental subject. When we talk to each other, we say “I think”, not “Markku Tamminen thinks”. If I want to ensure the other that I mean “Markku Tamminen”, if for instance the other is blind, I can use the words “I, Markku Tamminen”. The 'I' in itself denotes, perhaps first of all, the transcendental subject, because it does not tell which particular 'I' is in question. Perhaps an indirect evidence and perhaps not so convincing, but a point worth mentioning. Language is clever, wiser than many philosophers.

A professor of astrophysics once started thinking deep, and said he has wondered why the universe has had the big trouble of beginning to exist. And it is a good question, especially for philosophers. For most cosmologists and other scientists the universe needs no reason or cause for its being, and after beginning to exist for no reason, it just evolves accident by accident, according to the “laws” of probabilistic wave functions. And even consciousness is a side product of maintaining some genetic structures that compete with each other.

It is for the solution of these kinds of impossibilities that I have introduced the concepts of transcendental subject and causa formalis.

Let's imagine a world with two people A and B, each with consciousness as its material property. You are A.

1. Why are you A, not B? How can anyone explain that? What makes the difference?

2. If B dies, B loses consciousness, but the world goes on. But if A dies, in other words if you die, what happens to the world? I suggest you think it over and not just assume as self-evident. A bit of reflective concentrating! Remember that you are dead.

The basic axiom of existence is this: If I cease to exist for good, also the world ceases to exist for good, and even so that it has never existed. This is self-evident for me, in the spirit of Descartes.

However, it is clear and obvious for everybody that my death does not mean the end of the world.

Therefore it is necessary that I, as a manifestation of subjectivity, as an individual subject of some kind, must be in the world as long as the world exists, and that means for ever, because there is no such thing as nonexistence. This is what I mean by the universal and fundamental character of the subject-object relation, and the postulate that the subject is the precondition of all being.

I really say, and it seems that also Wittgenstein says, that the world would cease to exist for good if I cease to exist for good. And what helps to avoid this catastrophe - and this is my view, not Wittgenstein's - is that the transcendental subject is really eternal and only adopts those various ways of being we call individual subjects or consciousnesses.

The concept of transcendental subject transmigrating through all the points of view to the world we call individuals makes the situation normal again. Only this way the world does not vanish away when I die.

I have taken the concept of transcendental subject to my conceptual repertoire. By it I mean the ontological I, which is the eternal viewpoint to the world and adopts all the different ways of being in the world we call individual subjects. This demands further elaboration.

My point is that the universe needs a reason of its being, and I have introduced the old Aristotelian concept of causa formalis, which I interpret as the transcendental subject which tends towards self-consciousness or transparency of being. This concept is something like the absolute spirit of Hegel, although I do not believe in spiritual substances. Causa formalis is in us.

The thesis can also be expressed so that my nonexistence is absurd as such, it not only loses the world and time, but all logic as well. So it is reductio ad absurdum, and therefore cannot be accepted. But death is real, though, and that is the paradox.

If, hypothetically, the universe would be born with a big bang for a subject, i.e. if the subject were the reason for its being, then it would be of no difference how long it would have taken for consciousness to appear. So time has nothing to do with this.

Just to make it still more clear what I mean by the transcendental subject:

I have said that it is 'a point of view to the world'. Now there are three parts in that expression:

1. a point
2. a view
3. the world

'A point' is the transcendental subject itself, an abstraction without independent being, the Wittgensteinian "limit of the world" or a point along which the world gets coordinated. It has no internal or external properties (although it must have some "metaphysical" properties to make it intelligible in the deepest sense, but that is another story).

'A view' is the way in which the subject is related to the world, and this is exactly what consciousness is. It has properties that are non-material, constituting a realm of its own, an ontological layer which is closest to us. Therefore it is also an independent research field, the field of phenomenology and psychology.

'The world' is what makes it possible for the transcendental subject to have a point of view, i.e. to be an individual subject or consciousness, i.e. to be at all, to exist. Our bodies belong to this material realm, being the "substrate" of consciousness (I am not sure if it is the right word). This is also the research field of so called proper sciences, as opposed to humanities.

I do not really claim that my death means the end of the world. Who could claim that? But what I claim and what I find evident is what Wittgenstein means by saying that ”my world ceases”. If my world ceases, logic ceases as well, and my death becomes an absurdity. All the same, this is metaphysically incompatible with the obvious truth that the world goes on after my death, and therefore needs a metaphysical synthesis of those two obvious but incompatible truths. So this is metaphysics and goes beyond logic.

My experience tells me nothing when I am dead. My world ends, or ceases, as Wittgenstein says. And, of course, the world of facts does not end, but it is just that obvious truth that is incompatible with the first truth, because my death would be absurd if I were not eternal in the sense of being always there in one way or other, as some individual subject with its special kind of consciousness. The vanishing of my world for good would, from the existential point of view, be a total vanishing of the factual world as well. But the world is there, it has not vanished. A paradox par excellence. And the solution by means of the concept of transcendental subject leads to a combination of solipsism and a modified transmigration theory. But that is metaphysics if anything.

How can there be several metaphysical I's? Who are the others? If there were many I's in the sense Wittgenstein means, they would be entities in the world, or facts of the world, i.e. material subjects. They would not be "limits of the world".

If I eat an apple instead of not eating an apple, I make a decision. If I eat an apple, the material world is different compared to the case I do not eat an apple. But what is the difference between my decision being free or not free? What does 'free' mean? I decide, is that not enough? Is something not happening according to laws of nature? Does my decision have something that has not a counterpart in the material world? If my decision is free, whatever it means, also the material world is free, because, in my opinion, consciousness and its material counterpart are the same thing seen from two ontological levels.

But really, what does 'freedom of the will' mean? Has the expression a real function or use in our language?

Ontologically we should speak about acts, for practical purposes we can speak about free or not free acts depending on circumstances that effect our acts, e.g. intentional and unintentional acts etc. There are, however, philosophers like Sartre who think that freedom is an ontological concept, because there is no causal connection between our acts, just "nothingness", as he says. Man is for him "a hole in the universe".

Our way of thinking about death is in the end quite superficial, perhaps because we are unconsciously afraid of it. We think there is no problem in thinking that the world goes on after our death. From the death of others we see that it does go on. But we do not dare to imagine what our ceasing to exist means, and I mean ceasing for good. My nonexistence for good is absurd and therefore impossible. My existence is not dependent on time. I exist or I do not exist, independent on time, and the latter is unthinkable for me, and I argue that those for whom it is thinkable have not thought it over. But the metaphysical consequences of all this are somewhat embarrassing.

My point is that the ceasing of my world for good and with it the ceasing of logic and time for me is more serious to the world and our reality than most of us think. Therefore we need some metaphysics.

A metaphysical syllogism:

1. The basic insight of Descartes, that I am, should be modified so that my self-evident existence is not dependent on time. Time is a property of existence, existence is not a property of time, so that there would be times at which I exist and other times at which I do not exist. This leads to solipsism.

2. All experiences are my experiences, because that is the meaning and idea of experience. Experiencing means presence, i.e. that something is here and now. There cannot be experiences that I am not experiencing, have not experienced or shall not experience, i.e. absent experiences. However, there are others with their own experiences. This leads to transmigration.

3. Therefore a satisfactory metaphysical world view is a sophisticated combination of solipsism and a modified transmigration theory, both of which are widely abandoned by philosophers, but in this combination they become plausible and consistent, and this theory is, as far as I can see, a necessary consequence of the premises. But I am sure that both the premises and the consequence are seen as nonsense among most philosophers. However, this is how I see the reality we are sharing. My view is paradoxical, but I think only on the level of language, because language presupposes the others as given. Therefore what I have tried to do is in fact precisely what was the conclusion of Tractatus and what should not be done: to speak about the unspeakable. Another thing to be noticed is this: if you have really understood what I am trying to say, you should feel some embarrassment as soon as you realize what it really means if it is true. I myself feel embarrassment.

I have my point of view to the world, and you have your point of view to the world. So there seems to be two metaphysical subjects. I think there must be a concrete relation between our points of view. If the relation is only that factual relation, a fact of the world, which we all know, then there must be several points of view. In fact I accept the concept of the metaphysical I, but we need to establish a concrete relation between those several points of view, and that is why I have introduced the concept of transcendental subject, which is the unifying principle between them, but it needs the transmigration part to complete the concrete picture, because I think Wittgenstein's view lacks concreteness and is very difficult to understand.

I think we must modify the old eastern thought of the transmigration of souls so that there is only one transcendental subject that adopts all the ways of being in the world we call individual subjects. How this is possible, and how it takes place concretely, we probably cannot know, but it is a hypothesis that answers many difficult existential questions, which many religions have failed to answer, for example: what does it mean to die?

Consciousness is so self-evident that it needs no explaining, because we essentially are what is meant by it. So let us try to explain other things like matter, the universe and the being of others, and leave our own being, consciousness, where it belongs, as the self-evident starting point. This is, of course, an ontological argument against materialism, which tries to explain consciousness by physical concepts.

I have used the concept of consciousness in the general sense meaning all forms of subjectivity as opposed to the being of stones, computers etc. that are not conscious because they are not subjects. Consciousness in this sense constitutes an ontological level of its own which differs conceptually from the material world in a radical manner, although there is probably a one-to-one correspondence or correlation between them.

If the universe consists of matter, and if matter is all there is, and if everything is reducible to the interaction of elementary particles, as many scientists say nowadays, then consciousness must be a reflexive relation of matter to itself, seen as a property of matter. In this sense consciousness would be the cosmos perceiving itself. But from the materialistic point of view this matter's property of seeing itself would not be necessary. We only happen to be here, seeing the world around us, and the world could just as well be there without us. This seems very implausible to me.

I think we must turn the picture upside down. What it self-evident is the being of the transcendental subject, the Cartesian 'I am', or the 'metaphysical I' of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which is the precondition of all being, something we cannot get rid of. But the being of the subject presupposes the being of the material world, which in turn can be interpreted as my relation to the others. The world is material because the others must be material in order to be in relation to me. But the others, just because they are others, i.e. other subjects, are manifestations of the transcendental subject, the very same 'I am'. So in the end the world, or universe, just because it is material, is the relation of the transcendental subject to itself, or my relation to myself. And this makes reality causa sui, potentially transparent to itself, and the being of the universe needs no explanation, because it is the relation of the self-evident subjectivity to itself, not the transcendent, irrational element that Sartre saw as “superfluous”.

To complete the picture, an additional element is needed, not so popular nowadays but necessary in this context, namely a modified concept of transmigration. So the transcendental subject has a spatial and temporal relation to itself. The spatial relation, through the material universe, guarantees its being in general and maybe in the end its transparency to itself, and the temporal relation, through transmigration, guarantees its eternal being.

Now, this is speculation, of course, and a metaphysical hypothesis, but I think philosophers must have some courage in addition to critical mind.

When I think, something happens in my brain. So there is a correlation between my brain and my thinking. Therefore it is very easy for us to make the conclusion that a certain kind of event or set of events in the material world always means a corresponding conscious state. But this is a mistake. My brain does not think. I think with my brain in the same way as I see with my eyes. So there is always the subject already, and the body is its instrument for consciousness. And a computer or robot is our instrument, an extension of our bodies, although it can simulate our behavior. A computer is not a subject and therefore not conscious.

'I' denotes (1) an individual, (2) the subject of the present experience ("here and now").
'You' denotes an individual.

If 'I' denotes the subject of the present experience, the following sentences should be true:

If you did not exist, the world would still exist.
If I did not exist, there would be nothing.
Therefore, because the world exists, I exist necessarily and eternally.

And all of you are manifestations of the 'I'.

I guess Wittgenstein would not like these kinds of language games, but there are things that cannot be expressed in ordinary language. Also poetic and seemingly paradoxical phrases can illuminate reality. I like Heidegger's style more than Wittgenstein's although there are many similarities between their thoughts, for example their critique of the "present-at-hand" ontology.

Still one observation:

When we say that the being of the world does not need our being, we contradict ourselves, because there is already the 'our being' presupposed. We must only clarify to ourselves the meaning of the 'we'.

Isn't experience something that defines consciousness? Matter does not have experiences although materialists keep insisting so. We have no experiences when we sleep without dreaming. When I have now this experience and then another experience, I am conscious. So temporality is another characteristic of consciousness (in the sense of original time, not physical). When I have no experiences, I am not conscious. So it seems to me that it is an on-off situation: an entity either is or is not conscious. And I wonder if a robot has an experience of time. Should we ask it/him/her?

I think that material objects are our instruments for being. This includes our brains and our computers. We think with our brains, and we use computers and robots for our own purposes. It is true that matter generates structures of consciousness, but for a potential consciousness. The properties of matter must have a reason for their being just those properties that make consciousness possible, and that reason can only come from consciousness itself, from the being of the subject.

By original time I mean the series of successive experiences: the present vanishing into the past and a new present appearing from the horizon of the future. Physical time is only an interval of spacetime where the present, for example, is ambiguous, and to speak of directly experiencing such time has no sense. It would be interesting to study the relation of these two time concepts. As can be seen from the word 'original' I see the subjective time concept more fundamental than the physical.

The internal logic of subjective time is such that (1) it never stands still, (2) the past is always before the present and the future. These are not facts, they are pure logic. The physical time, instead, according to general relativity, allows time in certain conditions (1) to stop, (2) to move backwards, (3) to take the role of space. Therefore it differs very much from our ordinary concept of time.

Suppose I have an experience with a content A and then an experience with a content B. There is nothing between them, and in fact they constitute an elementary unit of time. What causes the experience of a flow of time, or identity of myself, is the fact that in the content B there must be something which refers to A, in the same way as there is a reference to the transcendent world. This reference is the basis of memory. So memory defines an individual.

I think that when we speak about subjective, phenomenal time or experiencing time we should use phenomenological concepts, not concepts of physics, because the relations between those two kinds of concepts may not be simple.

We should notice the difference between experiencing and the content of experience, or the content of the present. Experiencing something is an event that creates the content of that experience, an event that can also be described on the physiological level. But the content of the present is something that is created all at the same time, within one and the same event of experiencing. And the whole content is there at the same time, at present. Two successive contents have nothing between them, i.e. no content. But a content of experience has characteristics that refer to contents of earlier experiences, which makes it possible for us to perceive phenomena that have duration, such as melodies, for example. Husserl's concept of retention comes to mind.

So I think that subjective time consists of units created by experiencing events, but the perception of time is perception of durations. And it is possible that subjective time as such cannot be perceived at all.

We can ask someone "Are you conscious?" or "Are you alive?", but it makes no sense to ask myself such questions. I think this tells us something about the logical and ontological status of consciousness. Being unconscious is an exceptional phenomenon from my point of view, which is the crucial point of view.

The big question is: What is the world that ceases to exist? Is it only my personal world, or my point of view to the world? Or the world in itself? And is the nothingness that my death means to me if I lose my existence for good, nothingness of all being? In that case nothingness would in fact exist in the sense that now there is something and when I am dead there is nothing.

But, you may say, the world still exists after you are dead, although you are nothing. So it is still true that nothingness in the absolute sense does not exist. And it is obvious that when someone else dies, the world goes on. And if the situation is symmetrical, the same should apply to myself as well.

But the situation is not symmetrical if my death means my nonexistence for good. What is the sense of saying that there is something if I do not exist as a point of reference to the world? This seems to be extremely difficult to understand although it is so self-evident. It only requires trying to imagine what the being of the world would mean if I were not there. To imagine such a situation is impossible, because there would be no situation. And it is not very good metaphysics to found one's ontology on something that cannot be imagined.

So there is a paradox here, and the paradox can be solved by making the inevitable conclusion that I do not lose my existence for good although I lose my personal existence. This is pure logic. And my being as the transcendental subject makes it possible that my relation to other individuals is symmetrical after all.

If I, as the transcendental subject, did not exist, there would be nothing, which is absurd. This is the key insight of my philosophy and the premise of all the metaphysical hypotheses that I have proposed, and if someone proves that it need not or cannot be so, all my thinking collapses and I am ready to turn my views about reality upside down.

When we speak about contents of consciousness, this already means some kind of discreteness. A content cannot exist at several moments of time, its being constitutes one moment, an elementary unit of time. But because it contains elements of retention, references to earlier contents of experience, we can experience the flow of time or a melody that has duration. Also those phenomena belong to the content which is in itself timeless, i.e. cannot be divided temporally. So consciousness consists of successive contents of experience with nothing between them.

The three spatial dimensions make the form through which the material world appears to us. And because we exist temporally, that is, our being consists of successive experiences of the world, also the world must be temporal, consisting of material events. We measure those events with our clocks, and now the situation becomes a bit more complicated, because those clocks go slower or faster depending on our position in relation to the clocks. Space and time get intertwined, and we have the concept of space-time, which is the result of applying and extending our original, subjective time to the material world.

The reason for existence in general is the fact that "Non-being is not" is a tautology. Why existence takes the shape of Homo sapiens is another question and leads us to wonder if all the species that evolution produces are necessary or not, and what is the meaning of randomness.

Consciousness need not be present at all times during the history of the universe, and it surely was not in the beginning, but the universe must be such that consciousness (i.e. us), ”emerges” at some point of space-time. Only on that presupposition we can meaningfully say that there is anything at all. So consciousness is essential for the very being of the universe.

My thoughts are part of my individual consciousness or empirical subject, because I can describe them. But the I who describes them can also observe, accept, criticize or reject them, and take many other attitudes at them. This I is something that cannot be described, because it has no properties, and it does not characterize me as an individual. On the contrary, I can even reject myself as an individual subject by committing suicide. I transcend myself, and in this role I can call myself the transcendental I. My view is that this I is universal and connects all of us to each other through the common flow of existence.

We are nothing in front of the almighty universe that runs its own course and does not care about the tiny accident that we are.

But, on the other hand, each of us is everything there is. Each of us is the universe.

If these pictures are incompatible, I choose the latter.

My world view is grounded on these basic insights:

1. If I did not exist, there would be nothing.
2. All experiences are mine.

Now these are paradoxical statements, because when I die, the world goes on, and there are certainly other individual subjects with their own experiences. So if those two principles are true, this must have some metaphysical consequences:

1. I am eternal.
2. We are all manifestations of one and the same 'I am'.

I think there is only one transcendental subject, transcendental in the sense that I transcend my individual self. It is the 'I am', the I who is just now having these experiences. In this role I am essentially temporal, a succession of experiences as the 'now' flows forward. All the individual subjects in the universe are manifestations of this 'I am', which is eternal although it must have had a beginning, for else I could not be here now.

My experiences are experiences of the world, and the world is, according to my hypothesis, my relation to other individual subjects, and in the end my relation to myself, which makes the universe causa sui, needing no other reason or cause to exist than itself, because the 'I am' is self-evident and not an accidental fact. I think the transcendental subject has an intrinsic property of, or tendency towards, self-transparency, which explains all the phenomena we are used to seeing as evolution, for example. And because my being consists of being in relation to other individuals, this relation must necessarily be material, as well as the others themselves, and also I as an individual. In fact matter can be defined as just that. So we are minds and bodies.

Because I am essentially temporal, I cannot have my being as another subject if I do not reincarnate or transmigrate and be born as that other. The others must be in my future or in my past, because they are not in my present as immediate experiences. This, however, leads to a new way of understanding the relation between subjective time and the time of the world. So the universal I demands, for its being, (1) the material world as its relationship with itself, which guarantees its being in general and its transparency for itself, and (2) transmigration, which guarantees its symmetry among all its manifestations and the principle that there are no foreign experiences that are absent rather than present.

It is true that this concept of transmigration leads to a gloomy picture of existence. We all have our own projects that collapse when we die, especially if we do not leave some cultural traces of us for the other manifestations to see and laugh at. It is like Sisyphus pushing the stone uphill and letting it roll back when he reaches the top.

This also leads to a strictly deterministic world view: everything has in a way already happened, because we can meet our past in the world and seemingly act on it.

So I would not say there is any other creator than the transcendental I that is the primus motor of everything and which has its own inner logic of being, a logic that we do not fully understand yet, but which hopefully becomes more understandable in the course of our cosmic evolution. I may be too optimistic, though.

By the concept of transcendental subject I mean something similar to the metaphysical I of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. It has no properties, being only a point along which the world is coordinated. It has being only in its manifestation as an individual subject in the world. It is not a thing of any kind. It is what connects one individual self to another individual self making subjective time one unified flow of events across the space-time of the universe.

As to the necessity of such a concept, I cannot present a logical proof for it. It is a metaphysical hypothesis made to explain some fundamental paradoxes of our existence, for example the paradox of death, and the insights that led me to build this scenario are too difficult to analyze logically, at least for my capacities at the moment.

But although I think it is a plausible view of reality, I understand that most people have not thought about things from this perspective. For them this is nothing but bad poetry, a joke, but it only shows how different our ways of thinking can be.

As to reification: When I say "I am Markku Tamminen" and you say "I am NN" we make a reification of the 'I am' as two different persons, and there is nothing wrong in that. But when I say "I exist" and you say "I exist" and we say there are two subjects existing, we make a reification that we should not make. There is only one I existing, only its content of existence varies as time goes by and it adopts all its various manifestations as individual subjects. In fact we should not even say "There is one I existing" because that implies some kind of substance, we can only say "I exist" or "I am", which is a kind of an expression of self-evidence referring to the transcendental I.

Note the distinction between 'transcendent' and 'transcendental'. The material world is transcendent, meaning 'outside of us', as opposed to our experience of it, which philosophers call immanence, meaning 'that which is immediately present to us'. The term 'transcendental' belongs to the realm of subjectivity, and the transcendental subject, as I see it, is the precondition of all being whatsoever, transcending our individual experiences. It is what we are from the perspective of our eternal being. This is, however, my own interpretation of the concept, and perhaps Kant, for example, had another meaning in his mind.

What I am trying to say is that there is no permanent self, only a "point of view" to the world, and this point of view can only have being as an individual subject or succession of experiences. But what is not so self-evident to all is that this point, which I call the transcendental I, or the 'I am', is the principle of unification between all individuals, a presence wandering through all reality. This is metaphysics, of course, not science, but I see no logical contradiction in it.

The being of the presence is always presence for an individual self, but according to my hypothesis there is a temporal connection between those individual subjects. This may or may not be illusory and it is based on an insight that may or may not be illusory.

The key is the impossibility of foreign experiences. In the pantheistic scenario there are experiences that are foreign to me although all individuals are "the same" in some way. The temporal connection makes this sameness concrete so that all experiences are mine, only at different moments of subjective time as the present flows on. This also guarantees the symmetry and equality between the existence of all individuals. So this is the rational basis of ethics.

The Eastern concept of transmigration with 'karma' etc. is not satisfactory as I see it, because it presupposes a memory of some kind between individuals, which I think is impossible. I think memory defines an individual. So the concept of transmigration must be modified somehow.

As to 'somethingness' and 'nothingness', I would say that the contents of experience are ”somethingness” and the metaphysical subject that goes through all experiences even beyond an individual subject's experiences is what can be called ”nothingness”. In fact I think there is nothing between two successive experiences and nothing between two successive individuals except the temporal succession. And I think this is the origin of time and its original meaning: a succession of "nows".

I think a modified concept of transmigration is needed to complete the picture, to make it concrete. The 'I am' cannot be present for everyone without a temporal connection between individual subjects. And the Absolute is not transcendent, it is the metaphysical subject which is the 'I am' in the deepest sense. This is how I see things at the moment.

I would say we are separate spatially but one temporally, i.e. in the flow of subjective time. I am this person now, not anyone else, but I do not know who or what I have been or who or what I will be as time goes by. This is what I mean by the modified concept of transmigration. Subjective time does not always follow physical time but sometimes leaps into physical past adopting the existence of another subject. This may seem paradoxical, though, and perhaps makes the hypothesis less plausible, but I see no logical contradiction in it. It is a clear but embarrassing idea, if really understood, and solves many existential paradoxes that are difficult to solve in any other way, leaving many problems still open for philosophers to attack on.

Solipsism is not conceivable without transmigration, because there are several of us here, and because our existence is temporal, there has to be a temporal connection between us if we are all manifestations of the universal consciousness.

I think we cannot jump outside of time. Existence is temporal. Any manifestation of the universal consciousness, or the metaphysical I of Wittgenstein, is temporal, and to contain all of us as its manifestations, it must be a succession of concrete presents beyond individual existence. And it must manifest itself as a concrete, present 'I am here now'. That is why transmigration is necessary: for concreteness.

I would not say time and matter are illusions, they are very real, in the core of our existence. This is in accordance with ontological idealism, the view I defend, although consciousness is the fundamental reality.

Consciousness and the material world are both very real, and so is time, because we exist by having successive experiences of the material world. I cannot imagine a world where we would not be conscious of the material world in a flow of experiences, because I cannot imagine a world or reality that is truly transcendent without immanence.

Each of us is a subject, an I. Each of us can say: “I exist.” Now I can say to someone: “If you did not exist, the world would still be almost the same as it is now”, and there seems to be nothing wrong in saying so. But if someone says to me the same thing, I begin to think about it and translate it into my own language: “If I did not exist, the world would still be almost the same as it is now.” I get perplexed and start thinking about my nonexistence, and get still more perplexed. What does it mean to say ”I would not exist”? How can I understand a world where I would not exist? Is there a fundamental asymmetry between me and others? And if there is, what does it mean? Can we explain reality in a way that saves its symmetry?

To make it clear, I see these self-evident facts: (1) there must be symmetry between us, (2) the being of the world is independent of my personal existence. The question is: how is this possible? What is it that saves the being of the world from my nonexistence?

To describe the seeming asymmetry between us:

There are many subjects in the universe, and I am one of them, an individual called Markku Tamminen. But why am I not the individual called Mahatma Gandhi, for example, or an ant? What connects me to this particular person Markku Tamminen? If I had no connection to or identity with any individual subject in the universe and the universe still contained all the subjects including a person called Markku Tamminen, i.e. if I did not exist but Markku Tamminen would exist with the same subjective properties as now, the community of subjects would be symmetric, but now that I exist as Markku Tamminen, it seems to be asymmetric. So the point is: what connects me to a particular subject although there are many subjects in the world? What makes me identical with Markku Tamminen and not identical with Elisabeth Taylor? Or why do I not feel the hunger of a starving man?

Perhaps it is these kinds of questions that made some people invent such concepts as the universal consciousness, Brahman and the like, and it is also these kinds of questions that made me create those language games that I have been playing. Some of you may find them funny, some of you may find them nonsense, but for me they are serious attempts to answer concrete existential questions.

Wittgenstein was wrong if he thought that all metaphysical language games are useless play of words. Some of them may be, others are not, and I leave it for others to decide to which category my games belong.

I only want to add some metaphysical considerations that I find interesting and necessary if we want to go deeper to the existential level, the level of our life and death, so to speak. When Heidegger wrote about the concept of 'philosophy of life', he said it is a concept like 'botany of plants'. This is what philosophy is for me, and that is why it goes far beyond science, although it should not, of course, adopt anything which is against empirical evidence. I have tried to take care of both logical consistency and empirical validity, but because I have tried to say something that is very difficult to express in words, I understand that my point is hard to find, and I myself sometimes have the feeling that my sentences are absurd. But their intention is good.

Finally something to think about: I think reality is a community of Leibniz's monads migrating from one to the other as a succession of "nows" in subjective time.

What I have tried to elaborate in my own way, is trying to solve the paradox with two opposite self-evident facts, or facts that I see self-evident: (1) the being of the world is independent of my personal existence, and all subjects form a symmetric community, (2) when I die, and if my existence ceases for good, the world also ceases to exist, and the symmetry between me and others seems to break.

Let us have these two sentences:

p: I cease to exist for good.
q: The world ceases to exist, even so that there has never been anything, no world, no me, no others, because also the past disappears.

p->q is true, and I am convinced of its truth. For me it is as self-evident as the Cartesian "I am".
We all know that q is false: the world does not disappear when I die.
Therefore p must also be false, since only a false statement can imply a false statement.
So my death does not mean my non-being, and everyone in our community of subjects can say the same. But this can be the case only if there is a temporal connection between us. This connection is the pure I behind each individual subject, the point of view or presence that migrates through all subjects adopting them as its manifestations on an endless journey.

This is a metaphysical hypothesis, of course, but the paradox that led me to this conclusion is obvious, I think, and I do not see any other possible conclusion.

But this all depends on accepting that p->q is true. And this cannot be proved, it can only be seen or not seen.

In ordinary language p->q says: "If I did not exist, there would be nothing." But it does not say: "If I did not exist as an individual subject, there would be nothing." Remember the distinction between me as an individual subject and the metaphysical I. So I am certain that if I did not exist, there would be nothing but, on the other hand, I am certain that there is a material world that is independent of my personal existence. And the consequence of this is all the metaphysics I have presented.

So the key point is the question if the implication p->q is true. All depends on it, and if someone proves that is not true, I am ready to abandon all my philosophical theories. Fortunately it cannot be proved to be true or false any more than the phrase "I am here now" can be proved to be true or false.

According to materialism reality consists of matter and its properties, and one of those properties is consciousness. According to ontological idealism, which is my standpoint, reality is a subject-object relation. If it were possible to remove the subject, also the object, i.e. the material world, would vanish. What we are talking about here is the relation of my personal existence to subjectivity in general, which is an internal property of reality. In other words, are there many subjects like the monads of Leibniz, or is there something that connects all of us to the same stream of experiences.

I start from evidence and the paradox. The paradox is a paradox precisely because it goes against facts. And still it is true. And it is this truth of it I want you to challenge, but you cannot challenge it by appealing to empirical facts, because the facts are already written in the paradox. You must somehow see the paradox differently than I do, to try to imagine your nonexistence. It needs reflection and a certain kind of insight. Something like Descartes' sum, 'I am'.

I do not think there is a scientific solution to the mind-body problem, because I do not share the materialist view of consciousness as a property of matter. In fact I see no problem in consciousness, because it is one member of the subject-object relation and as such fundamental. Why do scientists think consciousness is a problem, not matter?

"The world is my world", Wittgenstein says in Tractatus. The world is a world of meanings and instruments. Modern physics holds the view that everything can be reduced to elementary particles and their interactions. It may be so, but those basic elements must be such that they can build structures that make it possible for the awakening subjectivity to experience the world. The world must be rational, and the subject-object relation that is the precondition of all being makes it rational. A world without subjectivity would reduce to nothingness, which is absurd and self-contradictory.

And that is why, if you try to imagine your nonexistence, you do not succeed. You can only imagine something, not nothing. And if you cannot imagine nothing, what sense is there to imagine that there is a world independent and outside of your nothingness? But this is not easy to prove with words if you have never thought it through and had a clear insight of it. It comes if it comes.

To clarify the distinction between the individual I and the transcendental I:

I can say to someone: “Look, I am here”, and the 'I' means 'I who have this body and these memories and so on'. But I can also ask myself: “Why do I have this body and these memories?” or simply: “Who am I”? Now I look at myself from outside. I transcend myself, and who is speaking now is the transcendental subject. I believe that the transcendental subject is transpersonal: it is the pure I that connects all of us so that there is only one I that migrates through all individual subjects. But the transmigration part of this is a hypothesis, and there are some problems in it that need further thinking, for example the relation of subjective time to physical time.

This is how I see the mind-body problem:

I exist as an individual subject and I have a relation to other individual subjects. Other subjects exist in exactly the same way as I, but because they are there outside of me, as others, they must be material organisms to be able to have a relation to me. So their bodies are their instruments of being related to me and other individuals. And in the same way I must have a body in order to be related to others. So the material world with all its organisms can be interpreted as an instrument for me and other subjects to be related to each others. What follows from all this is that there is a correlation between consciousness and the material world. When I see someone, something happens in our organisms and the rest of the world between us, some photons hitting my retina and so on. And when I think of something, something happens in my brain, in the rest of my body and in the rest of the material world. So I see with my eyes and think with my brain. My eyes do not see and my brain does not think, as opposed to the standpoint of materialism.

The origin of the basic mistake of materialism seems to be the fact that everywhere we look, we see only matter, and even the instances of consciousness we meet seem to be strongly connected to material organisms. So we make the conclusion that everything, including consciousness, can in the end be explained and interpreted as properties of matter. But in this way we forget the totality of existence: that we are in the world and part of it, but, on the other hand, conscious of that same world, seeing ourselves as part of it. Instead of starting from the metaphysical presupposition that only matter is fundamental we should start from the totality: our being in the world. In this way the situation becomes a bit more complex on one hand, but simpler on the other hand, because this way of looking at things makes it easier to explain many difficult problems, including the pseudo problem of consciousness. The basic mistake of materialism is trying to interpret, with no success, what 'we' and 'I' denote as properties of something more fundamental, and not seeing that they are basic constituents of reality, members of the irreducible subject-object relation. But there is nothing substantial in them, they are transcendental.

Some concrete metaphysical questions:

Why is there something instead of nothing?
Is reality rational? What does irrationality mean?
Is everything necessary or is there something which is contingent? What does contingency mean?
Is there such a thing as chance or genuine probability in nature?
What is the relationship between subjective time and physical space-time?
Does subjective time have a beginning and an end?
Which is more fundamental, matter or subjectivity, or are they interrelated?
What does it mean to have a world with no one experiencing it?

And much more. These are questions that are connected to our very existence and should, I think, concern us at least as much as the empirical questions of physics and biology, the answering of which has been so great success in recent decades.

Why can't objects of consciousness be historical? Why should there be consciousness in the past of the universe in order for it to be an object for consciousness? I see the universe as a totality. To say it metaphorically: a ball is a ball although its segments are not balls. But it is true that this presupposes teleology and a holistic view of reality. The expression of this teleology is the fundamental subject-object relation.

Consciousness begins when the subject begins, and the subject begins when there is the present, the basic unit of temporality. The being of the present means that there is something present for the subject and it is there at the present moment. Rocks and computers do not have their own present, all they have is our present. So what defines consciousness is temporality, and this is what material things do not have, not even our brains.

We are conscious, i.e. temporal, using our bodies. Our bodies are neither conscious nor temporal. They are located in physical time, but that is not what original temporality means.

To understand ontology of consciousness and ontology of matter we need phenomenology. To understand facts of consciousness we need psychology. To understand facts of the material world we need physics. To understand the relations between facts of consciousness and facts of the material world we need brain research.

So there are many levels of understanding. But we should not presuppose the materialistic ontology as a premise and try to explain consciousness from that premise. It has not succeeded so far and, as far as I can see, will not succeed in the future, because the ontology behind those efforts is not satisfactory. We must clarify our ontological standpoint first, by phenomenological studies.

If reality is not rational, i.e. if it has no meaning, this irrationality is still something we are concerned with, and it does not necessarily stop our questioning about meaning.

The DNA molecule, for example, is what it is and therefore behaves as it behaves. We cannot find any meaning in it. But what makes us ask about meaning is this: why do elementary particles and their interactions happen to be such that they can form, and in fact do form, complex structures like DNA molecules and Markku Tamminen? Meaning, if any, lies in what there is, not in the properties of what there is. There are no such properties in the DNA molecule that suggest any meaning, but the very existence of DNA molecules might be an expression of some kind of cosmic meaning. It is still an open question if there is any meaning or rationality in the universe, or if everything is meaningless an absurd, as e.g. Camus seems to think. And laws of nature do not make the world any less absurd. Or do they?

To be honest, I do not quite understand what we mean by God. But there is the question of rationality vs. irrationality of reality. Because we are thinking beings, we easily claim some rationality of the universe which is our home, so to speak. And the view of ontological idealism could be that this rationality comes from subjectivity, i.e. from us in a way, although at the cosmic level, so that the universe would be causa sui, explaining itself from within. This means some kind of teleology or causa formalis, explaining the world from the premise of our existence, the 'I am' of Descartes, and not vice versa, i.e. explaining our existence by reducing it to the basic components of physics. These kinds of thoughts are not very popular nowadays, but it should be noted that they are not incompatible with scientific facts, being only metaphysical interpretations of those facts. And now we are at the center of the question: "What is the meaning of life?"

I admit that a universe which is finite in space-time is difficult to understand, but so is a universe that is infinite. Here we are reminded of the antinomies of Kant. For example, how can we be here if there has always been a real moment of time before each moment of time? I think the general relativity theory has succeeded to solve this in a satisfactory way, with its non-euclidean space-time where space can be finite or infinite, but time is finite in the past. This is something Winnie the Pooh cannot understand, but it explains observations, though not all of them. And what comes to the rationality or meaning of all this, that is another question.

Think of subjective time. You were born. Was there time before that? Maybe, but you don't remember anything of it. Maybe there was nothing, not even time. So it is not impossible to imagine subjective time with a beginning, why not physical time? Another thing is that I cannot imagine the end of time, either subjective or physical. But maybe that is my personal problem.

On Being and Otherness:


Being is. Non-being is not. These are tautologies.
So there is being.

Being is being of something.
Being is temporal.

That being is temporal means that there is something now and then there is something now. Being is succession of presents.

There must have been the first present, because if there were a present before each present, there could not be this present.

There cannot be a last present, because that would mean non-being, which would be self-contradictory.

So being is a series of presents with a beginning and no end.

But what is this 'something' of being?

In fact it seems that there cannot be anything, because there seems to be no reason for anything.

Nevertheless, there is something, as we see.

That something which is the content of the present points towards two directions: otherness and the past.

Otherness means the revelation of the subject-object relation. The other is an object and I am a subject. I come to the stage for the first time. But the other is also a subject.

My present is a synthesis of my relations to the other and to my past. As long as the past is involved in the synthesis, I remain the same individual. So memory defines an individual. Death is forgetting.

There is a symmetric relation between me and the other. I am also the other and the other is also I.

My relation to the other is the world. The world is material. The world is the concrete realization of my relation to the other.

There are many others, as we see. And because of the symmetric relation between us the world is in fact my concrete relation to myself.

So I am the others and the others are I. But because I am now I and not an other, the others must be in my past or in my future. This means that we must understand in a new way the relation between subjective time and physical time.

All this means that the ontology of being is a combination of solipsism and transmigration of the self or I.

Now we see the rationality of the 'something'. The world explains itself from within. Being is really nothing but my relation to myself and the 'something' is the tautological 'being is' or 'I am' itself. But the realization of this requires the whole universe with all its structures and evolutionary processes.

If being ever becomes transparent to itself remains an open question. We have always dreamed of an everlasting heaven, paradise or nirvana, but maybe the logic of being does not fulfill our dreams. Perhaps the myth of Sisyphus gives us a more realistic picture of our existential situation.

Nevertheless, all we have is the future.

If a robot "sees" a yellow wall and we ask it to tell what color it sees, it will answer: yellow, because that is what it has learned. But it does not see the yellow wall as yellow, it only receives light waves of certain length. In fact it really sees nothing, seeing is not the proper term for what happens.

If we adopt the view that consciousness emerges from matter, it is quite natural to ask if machines can be conscious. But that is not what I think of consciousness: it is a much more fundamental phenomenon.

We can meaningfully say that we see things as having colors, for example, because we are conscious subjects, but a robot is an object and therefore there are only physical processes happening in it. When a robot says it sees a yellow spot, it is a yellow spot for us, not for the robot. The robot does not exist in the existential sense.

I don't think subjects are physical or material although they need material organisms for their being. Our bodies are not subjects. They are not conscious, either, in the sense that consciousness would be their material property. We are conscious but our bodies are not.

A robot is not a subject, not an I. It does not understand the 'I am' of Descartes.

Consciousness is not an elan vital that only humans have. It is something that is already there, as a possibility in the elementary particles even at the moment of the big bang. The material organisms that evolve as time goes on, are its organs or instruments of being. This is why only natural organisms are conscious. Their bodies are their instruments of existing, i.e. being conscious. They can extend their bodies by making hammers, robots etc., but none of these, nor their bodies, are conscious in themselves. This is what I mean by saying that the subject-object relation is fundamental, and that a world without subjectivity is not possible.

We walk with our legs, see with our eyes, think with our brains, hammer with our hammers and use our robots to help us by making them simulate our behavior.

The subject-object relation is the subject's relation to the material universe. Consciousness is the subjective side of this relation and the body, as part of the material universe, is its objective side. It is one and the same relation, but there necessarily appears two conceptually incompatible layers of description, e.g. qualia vs. brain events. Therefore we have a mind-body correspondence or parallelism.

I can make an experiment: always when I see yellow, I observe feature X among my brain events, and always when I observe feature X among my brain events I see yellow. Now I can say that seeing yellow is X, and that is true in a sense. But can you imagine a robot making that experiment?
All in all, I would say that robots behave and "think" within the rules we have made, whereas we cannot find any fixed rules in us if we do not believe in the rules God has given us when he created us from dust. What motivates a robot? And all conscious beings we know die. What does it mean to say a robot dies?

We are in relation to the material world. When I see a tree, the subjective component of that relation is the perception, the objective part the tree, light waves, my brain processes etc. When I think of the tree, the subjective part is the thought, the objective part the corresponding brain processes. I think there is really no other mind-body problem than studying the correlations, i.e. the parallelism between mental and physical events, because the relation is one and the same, only the levels of description are ontologically incompatible.

I am a dualist in the sense that the subject-object relation is fundamental and that the subject is not a property of matter but something that is already there as an ontological precondition of being. Material objects like our bodies and robots are our instruments of being. Consciousness is the self-evident 'I am' of Descartes taken ontologically, not only epistemologically. Therefore I think that only natural organisms can be conscious.

A question that would be a genuine "why" question could be something like: "Why did the Big Bang happen?" where the answer could be, for instance: "Because we are here." If the Big Bang did not happen, we would not be here, and we are here necessarily because the ontological precondition of being, the Cartesian 'I am' is self-evident. So "why" questions arise when we make metaphysical interpretations of empirical evidence.

I admit it is difficult for us to draw a line between conscious organisms and non-conscious things, but I think it is an on-off situation: there is consciousness or there is not, because consciousness is essentially subjectivity, and in my view subjectivity is not a property of matter. I would say there is consciousness if there is a temporal present, an elementary unit of subjective time. But it may be impossible for us to detect if a thing is conscious or not. However, I suppose the minimum criterion is a natural evolution of the things that consciousness adopts as its instruments of being. I cannot prove this, though.

Some questions may look like non-questions because we lack the horizon for asking them. The horizon is our general view of reality. For a materialist questions like "Why did the Big Bang happen?" or "Why is there anything?" may seem nonsense, but if we see consciousness as fundamental, the same questions can be seen as the most concrete and most important of all questions.

Consciousness is not a substance a´la Descartes, but an original and fundamental precondition of all being whatsoever. If there is an 'I am' or a subjective experience constituting subjective time, then there is consciousness, if not, there is no consciousness. This is an ontological statement. And note that consciousness can be a precondition of all being although all being is not conscious.

When I perceive a particular yellow spot, for instance, the event of perceiving can be described on the physiological level as brain processes, but the content of that experience, the particular yellow spot, is on a fundamentally different conceptual level just because it is a content. Contents are not processes. Processes produce contents of consciousness, and these contents are in fact precisely what we call consciousness, at least how I understand that concept.

So consciousness and matter are necessarily ontologically separate levels of being, although they may express one and the same relation we have to to the world. What is fundamental is subjectivity, which is the ”point” in the point of view to the world, also called consciousness, that subjectivity adopts by using material organisms for its being. And when I say "using" I use that word metaphorically to describe the basic ontological structure of reality. Concepts like 'using', 'willing' and 'intending' may be expressions of the same structure but come to the picture later on.

The fact that contents of consciousness are on a conceptually different level than brain events has nothing to do with the question of how the brain processes information: digitally or analogically. The levels are conceptually incompatible. We cannot even meaningfully speak about the analog/digital difference in the case of consciousness.

On the ontological structure of reality: I think we can speak of teleology or final causes when we speak of cosmology, but the words 'intention', 'purpose', 'will', 'motivation' etc. should be reserved to describe individuals.

The being of consciousness needs no explanation, because consciousness is the ontological precondition of all questions and explanations. The being of matter needs explaining, because its rationality is not as self-evident as the rationality of consciousness. So we need not ask "Why is there consciousness?", but we should ask "Why is there matter?" and "Why is the material universe exactly such as it is?" Empirical science cannot answer these kinds of questions, so they are left for reflective science, i.e. philosophy. Physics, for instance, can make unbelievably accurate predictions in the world of elementary particles using the equations of the Standard Model, and it has good reason to be proud of its achievements, but it has not the faintest idea about why the elementary particles are such as they are and what their basic properties mean: what is spin, what is electric charge, what is time? But it is not its business to think about these questions if there is no empirical solution to them.

This is what I mean by an alternate horizon of seeing things. It is totally different from the materialistic horizon and produces different kinds of questions and answers. However, it leaves sciences where they are, if they do not adopt metaphysical presuppositions, for instance the presupposition that consciousness is a property of matter, because that only leads to confusion and endless debates of non-existent problems.

If we can read others' thoughts in the future, which I doubt, this will happen through our brains, but we will not find them in our brains, because they are not there. Our language is full of these misleading metaphors: 'heart' means feeling, 'head' means thinking etc.

There is definitely a parallelism between mind and body, so in this sense both are complex phenomena, but the reason for the being of consciousness is self-evident, because it is the realization of subjectivity itself, the relation of the 'metaphysical subject', or the Cartesian 'I am' to the material world. The self-evidence of the being of this I is as clear to me as it was to Descartes, and this must indeed be interpreted ontologically. In this sense I am an ontological idealist.

As I have said, I see the subject-object relation fundamental and unbreakable. Secondly, I think that the subject is a not an emergent property of matter, nor is consciousness. And finally, the subject is more fundamental in the subject-object relation, being the clue of all reality.

I would put it this way: The being of the material world depends on the being of subjectivity, but subjectivity is in relation to the world, and therefore there must be the subjective side and the objective side of that relation, just because the world is material and the subject, or consciousness of the world, is not material. So there are mind-body correlations, two conceptually incompatible levels of description in our relation to the world.

There cannot be a world without subjectivity, but subjectivity must "find" the world. We call this scientific progress.

Consciousness can be referred to. We find it in reflection a´la Descartes and in seeing that there are other conscious subjects. I myself have tried to define it by saying that it is the temporal present of subjective time, but that is more like trying to describe the key structures of consciousness rather than defining it by other than itself. Heidegger described the ontological structure of Dasein using expressions like temporality and "worldhood", but he never tried to define consciousness, because he understood its fundamental nature.

If death means the end of being, there is non-being, which is self-contradictory. The problem is, of course, if the premise is as self-evident as I see it is.

The premise is: "If death means the end of being, there is non-being."

This is self-contradictory if by "non-being" we mean nothingness. I have noticed that there are not many who see this "axiom" as self-evident as I do.

What I am saying is that there can be a world that is independent of my personal existence only if I exist as a universal and eternal subject, i.e. if all of us are manifestations of one and the same subjectivity.

All I am saying depends on one axiom of existence: "If I did not exist, there would be nothing." I keep wondering if anyone can imagine one's own nonexistence, truly. Others', yes, but mine? And still there is the world after my death: a paradox that can be resolved only by seeing that my existence is eternal, and so is everybody's.

This is pure logic, but only on the condition that the axiom above can be seen as self-evident, which seems to be difficult for most people for some reason. But admittedly it was a remarkable insight for me, too.

The subjective past is problematic in the sense that it seems to be finite although we cannot remember when it began, but the subjective future is endless at least as I see it, because else there would be absolute non-being, and that is self-contradictory.

I see the subjective past necessarily finite and the subjective future necessarily endless. I do not speak of my personal past or personal future here. Why the past must be finite needs some reasoning.

The mind is the realization of the subject's relationship with the material world and therefore has in itself nothing to do with matter. Subjectivity is the fundamental and irreducible "reference point" of reality. And because the subject has a relation to the material world, the mind and the body are the two sides of this relationship. So there is one relation and two ways of describing this relation, and therefore the mind and the body are identical in their functions but totally different in the description of those functions. That is why there is no "hard problem" with the mind-body relationship, only the scientific problem of finding the correlations between them.

Being is succession of presents. If there were a present preceding each present, I could not be here now. If there were the last present, there would be non-being. Therefore both a past with no beginning and a future with an end are self-contradictory. So being is succession of presents with a beginning and no end.

'I' can denote an individual with this body and these memories, but it can also denote subjectivity in general. And because subjectivity cannot be eliminated from the structure of reality, "I am" means essentially the same as "being is". They are both tautologies, expressing one and the same self-evidence.

So we should note the difference between 'I' as an individual and 'I' as the experiencer.

I am using the word 'mind' here in a very general sense, as a synonym for 'consciousness'. It contains all modes of subjectivity, including the mind of an ant and the mind of a scientist, for instance; everything that participates in subjective temporality.

The subjective content of this experiencing is not material, because a content cannot be material. But because this subjective experiencing is realized by a material organism, there must be a material counterpart for each content. This is my hypothesis.

So an event, like thinking, has a content and the corresponding brain event, and they are the same thing described on different conceptual levels.

I can make an experiment: always when I see yellow, I observe feature X among my brain events, and always when I observe feature X among my brain events I see yellow. Now I can say that seeing yellow is X, i.e. it is one event, described as "seeing yellow" or "X". These two ways of describing the event go parallel, neither of them is an explanation of the other. And my hypothesis is that every feature of consciousness has this material counterpart which can be described on the physiological level. I see no other mind-body problem.

We cannot reduce the mind to material processes, because I think the mind, or consciousness, or subjectivity, is fundamental and the key for all being whatsoever. It only "needs" the material organism for its being.

We can say that the subject is "thrown into the world" and has therefore a relation to the world. Because the world is material, the relation is also material, consisting of the material organism we call the body. But because the subject is not material, the very same relation is also a relation of meanings, intentions etc., a relation we call the mind.

I think we make the same mistake as Descartes did when he thought that the 'I' is the same as the soul and the soul is some kind of substance. He reified the mind. When we try to catch the mind, we see nothing there, only the 'I am' in reflection, and thoughts, feelings, memories, dreams etc. But that is all there is, there is nothing behind them. We try to make the Münchhausen's trick if we seek some peculiar substance behind what we see already. The mind is not substance, it is our way of being in the world. We can study the mind phenomenologically and make interesting observations, but we cannot explain it from outside, because there is no outside.

It is not easy to convince anybody that AI has no mind, but here is another attempt:

Why are there living organisms? Because they are conscious, like us. If they were not conscious, there would be no reason for their being. We can say that a living organism is created by consciousness as an instrument for its being. This is what evolution really means: it is evolution of consciousness.

Robots are also created by consciousness: our consciousness. We create them as extensions of our bodies, to improve our brain capacities etc. We are the only reason for their being.

By consciousness I mean all kinds of subjective experience. The definition has been under discussion, but that is not the point. I believe that evolution is a process dealing with subjective experiences and their development. Therefore natural living organisms are evolving towards consciousness if they are not conscious already. And consciousness is the key to understanding living organisms, the rationality of their being. And as I said, I think material organisms are instruments for the being of consciousness.

Our brains do not think. Our robots do not think, because they are extensions of our brains. We think with our brains, and if they are too small, we can always use our extensions.

I see the question of whether a computer can be conscious as a question of subjective experiences, not a question if a computer can have an awareness of self. Of course there are various degrees of consciousness, but what is common to them is some kind of subjective experience. That is what I meant when I said that they are "like us". And I do not know if bacteria, flowers or mushrooms have even a primitive kind of consciousness, but then, neither has a human embryo at its early stages, and still it becomes conscious. We should look at the whole: the ecosystem and the universe. The rocks and some living organisms are not conscious, but the universal subjectivity that manifests itself as various forms of consciousness guarantees that the universe is not totally irrational. So there is some kind of teleology in the universe, and this principle of subjectivity is connected to various forms of living organisms, which are or are not conscious as is needed by subjectivity itself to make its being possible in the form of various kinds of conscious beings. So consciousness evolves naturally, according to the logic of its development, and material organisms as well as artificial products are its instruments of realizing its being.

So there is a lot of metaphysical interpretation in this scenario, but I cannot make any simple argument against machine-minds. I think the qualia argument is a good one, but it does not seem to be convincing enough. On the other hand, perhaps no argument is.

I think that a bacterium is in some kind of pre-conscious phase of evolution, not yet conscious, a bit like an embryo. Computers have nothing to do with consciousness, even primitive, because they are our instruments like our brains. Consciousness is an on-off phenomenon: it is or is not, because it is the basic element of subjective time. Where the line between conscious and non-conscious is in nature, I cannot say.

To be poetic: consciousness seeks a home and it does not find it in rocks or robots. Or better: it builds its own home.

Consciousness is consciousness of objects in the material world. Our bodies belong to the material world. Therefore consciousness cannot be a property of our bodies.

The subject-object relation is fundamental. If there were no material world, there would be nothing. If there were no subject, there would be nothing.

Therefore a short definition of consciousness is as follows: Consciousness is the subjective side of the subject-object relation.

Our bodies are its objective side.

By the way: there is no conceptual bridge between our minds and bodies.

The presupposition of materialism seems to be that consciousness is a property of matter. I think it is the organizing principle of matter. It is not a substance different from matter, rather it is a perspective to the world, where the subject uses matter for its being. The subject-object relation is fundamental. We cannot get rid of the subject.

Consciousness is something spontaneous, it evolves naturally, using matter as its instrument.

All this said, I cannot prove that this kind of organism, although it seems to require natural evolution, cannot in principle be made by us. I doubt it though.

It seems that there are two questions under discussion: (1) is it possible for a computer to be a subject? (2) is it possible for a computer to be aware of itself? If we can answer the first question, the second one cannot be very difficult to answer.

Perhaps the only cause and reason for the being of the universe is consciousness. Let us compare it with the being of an individual human person. When it is an embryo in the early stages of its development, it is not conscious, but then it becomes conscious. It is a spatio-temporal totality with consciousness as its essence. The universe can be seen in the same way: it was born with the big bang and evolved towards consciousness, which is its essence. This way of seeing things has a remarkable advantage: because consciousness is the precondition of all being, we do not need to seek causes for the being of the universe or the being of consciousness. The universe explains itself from within, being a self-evident causa sui. All this is based on the insight that subjectivity needs no explanation.

But consciousness, as well as the universe, begins from absolute zero. Why not?

Spinoza says the body is the object of the mind and that mind and body are two attributes of one and the same substance, Nature. I also think that the subject-object relation is one relation with two sides or points of view to it. So there is no extra substance called 'soul' or any "thing" called 'I'. But because I think subjectivity is the more fundamental part of the subject-object relation, I could perhaps define myself as an ontological idealist, if a definition is needed.

If my body will be copied to make two exact copies of myself, and so that also my individual subject would be exactly the same in both copies, there would still be one difference: I will be one of the copies, continuing my life as that copy, and the other copy is another subject for me. My being that copy and not the other is the only difference. And that difference is something that goes beyond science, as far as we can see. This leads our thoughts to otherness in general.

What I think, and what is my interpretation of Spinoza as well, goes roughly as follows:

When I see a tree, there are two parallel and conceptually incompatible levels of describing the event:

1. My perception of the tree
2. The tree itself, light waves hitting my retina, my brain processes etc.

Those two levels have no causal relations with each other. Causation goes from the tree through light waves to my brain. And all this is "expressed" as my seeing the tree.

I would say consciousness was already there at the big bang as a potentiality, and the universe is the instrument for its growing to actuality.

I cannot imagine a universe without consciousness, because I think the subject-object relation is fundamental and we cannot get rid of the subject when we think about reality. This does not mean, of course, that there has always been consciousness in the universe, so I do not stand for panpsychism, but in the same way as an embryo is not yet conscious but will be, the universe can be seen as a totality or an organism with consciousness as its rational cause of being. How far consciousness can evolve is another question, Hegel thought it can become a self-conscious universe, the Absolute thinking of itself or being transparent to itself.

Notice that I do not say there are some other kinds of consciousness than our individual consciousnesses, for example some kind of collective consciousness or even a transcendent consciousness, God for instance.

The basic elements of matter, as modern physics describes them, must have such properties that the being of consciousness becomes possible, otherwise there would not be consciousness. This is a tautological statement that reductionist physics can accept, and so can I. And, as Feynman says, everything that is possible in physics, happens. But my ontological interpretation of that reductionist principle is different from that of materialism: as I said, everything happens in accordance with the rationality that consciousness guarantees. For materialist science the being of consciousness would not be necessary, and a universe with no subjectivity would be as possible as a universe with subjects, but I think that is an absurd thought. For if the subject is removed from the subject-object relation, also the object vanishes.

Perhaps consciousness evolves by some kind of trial and error principle. Perhaps there has been many failures already, in other planets. And because there happens to be a success here, we are here to witness it. We do not know the logic of consciousness, yet.

About the "concepts" of 'I' and 'we': it cannot be so that if Earth were not inhabited, I would not exist and we would not exist. I exist and we exist where there is consciousness.

I would say that living organisms can fail to be conscious, but there is only one universe, so it cannot fail. Inside of the universe there can be trials and errors, but the universe itself cannot be a trial. Except if we think about a multiverse.

I think consciousness is the key if we want to understand the universe and reality in general. The universe can be seen as an instrument for consciousness to realize itself. Consciousness is immanent, I do not believe in transcendence.

I think that there must be the subject, but it is not a property of matter. I see it as a kind of organizing principle that regulates our existence in the material world by uniting our ideas in the flow of events we call life. It needs the material organism for its being, but it does not emerge from matter. It also need not be any kind of substance, it is transcendental. It is something that is common to us, and our individual consciousnesses are its manifestations. Besides being simple, this idea has the advantage that the transcendental subject can be detected in reflection, as e.g. the cogito of Descartes, whereas the substantial subject, if there is such a thing, cannot be found by any method.

Who is I?

There are many I's in the universe, and I am one of them.

If the only I's in the universe were I's of rats, would it mean that I would not be in the universe? That I would not exist?

No. I would be one of those rats.

And a universe without I's is inconceivable.

But what is the relation between the I that I am and the I's that I am not, i.e. the other I's in the universe?

I think that evolution is essentially evolution of consciousness. But because consciousness needs a material basis, we have our bodies to make our being possible. Our bodies, including brains, are our instruments for being, and we make other instruments, like computers, to improve our mental capacities. So our bodies, brains and computers are not conscious, and science cannot find consciousness in our brains or computers. Science finds consciousness in our behavior as we understand each other, and consciousness is already presupposed in our understanding. This science is called psychology. Neuroscience only finds correlates of consciousness.

'I' denotes the subject of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, dreams, fantasies etc. It is the reference point of all experiences, expressing the fact that they are my experiences here and now. 'I' can denote the subject of my personal experiences, defining me as 'Markku Tamminen', but it can also denote the universal subject that happens to have just these experiences here and now, whatever individual subject is having them. This is the absolute I in the sense that it is the precondition of all being, one of the unremovable members of the subject-object relation, making the world essentially my world, to use Wittgenstein's phrase.

There are those who think that the subject is indeed something "thing-like", emerging from matter, whereas I think it is essentially more fundamental and has nothing to do with matter, except that it needs the material world for its being. It is the non-substantial point of view to the world, the origin of consciousness. Consciousness is my consciousness of the world.

Wittgenstein writes in his Notebooks that there are two divinities, the world of facts and the metaphysical, point-like subject that does not belong to the world.

You are not me, so it seems. Your experiences are your own, I am not having them here and now, they are absent. So there seems to be a violation of symmetry here.

When the bubble that I am vanishes, what is left? Other bubbles. But what are those other bubbles? If there is symmetry between all bubbles, I must be another bubble after vanishing.

So, if there is something after my death, I cannot vanish.

Those old Eastern thinkers were not stupid.

Let me return to my favorite syllogism.

1. If I did not exist, there would be nothing.
2. There is something, obviously.
3. Therefore my nonexistence is impossible.

Now sentence 2 is obviously true. The conclusion, sentence 3, is pure logic. What is left is sentence 1. Its truth can be questioned and even denied straightforward, but for me it is self-evident. I admit that it demands some kind of an insight to become convinced of its truth, and it may be one of those clear ideas that are almost impossible to translate into words, although the structure of the sentence is so simple. It is possible that if one has not had that insight, the only way to see the truth of it is to only wait and hope that the insight comes.

So simple. So revolutionary. The Copernican revolution of Kant completed?

I would define language as a tool for communication. So we must have something to communicate: thoughts and other experiential phenomena. We express our thoughts with language. Even if our thoughts are made for communication in the first place, there must still be the sequence of thought and its expression. How this all happens is a scientific question, not philosophical. But all this depends, of course, on how we define language. There has been a need to separate the concepts of thought and language, though.

The structures of thought and the structures of language are similar, but this is just because language expresses our thoughts.

I can remember a thought structure without words. I would not say this is language.

Also I would say that thoughts have meaning and language expresses that meaning, if we define the concepts in the way I suggested.

In fact the "syllogism" should go like this:

1. If I did not exist, there would be nothing.
2. There is something, also after my death.
3. Therefore my nonexistence is impossible, also after my death.

What I say in sentence 1 has nothing to do with the material universe. It is a phenomenological statement, expressing something immediately obvious, at least for me. And it must be noted that it says something about being in general, not only about my personal existence.

To better understand what I am trying to say, we should see the relation between being and time. Time is a basic property of being, as space-time in the material world, and as subjective time in our immediate reality. This means that being does not depend on time, so that now there would be being and then there would not. On the contrary, time depends on being.

And this is true in a way: I am the universe in the sense that the subject-object relation is fundamental. Without the subject there can be no universe.

I share the idea of the universal consciousness, but we cannot escape temporality. We can be conscious of the universe only through one bubble at a time, and when that bubble pops, there must be a transition to another bubble. The old Eastern thinkers called it transmigration.

'We' is a word we use in our everyday communication with each other, and it is necessary as such. But in deeper sight we are successive manifestations of one and the same 'I'. This is my hypothesis.

The I is the universal, non-substantial precondition of all being. It is not part of the world. It is like a reference point from which the world is seen and experienced. The mind is my mind, constituting my consciousness of the world. The body is my body. My body cannot experience anything. Only I can experience, with the help of my body. My mind, or consciousness, is the subjective side of my relation to the world, and my body is its objective side, being on the same ontological level as the material world. My mind and my body are conceptually incompatible, although they are factually the same thing seen from different angles.

But there is no spiritual substance.

"If I did not exist, there would be nothing."

What I tried to say was that the existence of the material universe is put into "brackets", a common method in phenomenology. Then a question is asked: "What is the state of the material universe if I do not exist?" And the answer is: "It does not exist, either." So we ignore the obvious fact that the material universe will exist even after my death. We are in front of a paradox, and the solution of the paradox is this: "My nonexistence is impossible, also after my death." Therefore we must make a distinction between the empirical subject and the transcendental subject. The empirical, individual subject, 'Markku Tamminen', will vanish away, but the transcendental, metaphysical, absolute subject is eternal. And all individuals are manifestations of this absolute subject. It migrates through all of us.

This is a hypothesis, of course.

I am here and now, but this here and now flows through all the bubbles. It cannot be everywhere at the same time, even though it can possibly be conscious of everything at the same time, if you are enlightened.

Being and time cannot be separated.

I can look into my brain and see what happens there as I look into my brain, and I can see my eye as I look into my brain. I can see the physiological correlate of my looking into my brain. But I cannot see me. That is why the 'I' is transcendental. It is not an observable entity. An eye does not see. I see.

A knife is not an observer or experiencer. It is a tool with no subjectivity.

I am an experiencer and you are an experiencer. How do I know that you are an experiencer? Because we communicate with each other and I understand you more or less. But one thing is lacking: I cannot see your experiences in the way you are having them. They are not observable entities. Only you can observe them in reflection. And therefore you are not an observable entity as an experiencer, only as a physiological organism that behaves like me and whose subjectivity is already presupposed in the fact that I understand you. So if you say that you are an experiencing thing, I must say that I appreciate you much more than you appreciate yourself.

By 'transcendental' I mean something that is the precondition of the being of entities, something that is not itself an entity. But it is not abstract. It is me, or us, concretely.

I am here and now, still and unmoved, but the bubbles come and go through me. But I can lose myself in the bubbles, lose my enlightened state and live my life as a rat, for instance. But that does not matter, does it? I only have the fate that Reality can offer me.

What is reality? Is it what physics describes? No. It is our being in the world that physics describes, and our being conscious of the very same world. We are objects and subjects at the same time. But we are objects as Others, and the subjectivity of Others is hidden but presupposed in our communicating with and understanding each other. Our consciousness of the world, and the subject that is conscious of the world, cannot be explained by physics or reduced to the world of physics. That is why the subject is transcendental. It is not a thing. It is the precondition of the being of things.

Münchhausen told that he had lifted himself from his hair, but he was a liar. That is why the subject is transcendental.

The subject is conscious of objects. This is the ontological structure of reality. The being of the subject depends on the being of objects and the being of objects depends on the being of the subject.

The totality of objects is the universe.

The being of the subject manifests itself as the being of individual subjects. The being of the universe does not depend on the being of any particular individual subject. From an individual subject's point of view objects are noumena, “things-in-themselves”.

Modern science is interested in objects. Philosophy is interested in reality as a whole. Philosophy is reflective.

The being of the subject and its consciousness of objects cannot be explained by objects of consciousness. On the contrary, the being of the universe can be explained by the being of the subject and its necessary internal structure.

To try to explain the being of the subject and the being of consciousness by properties of matter is like trying to explain the idea of knife by the physical properties of the blade of the knife.

The universe is like a home for us. Its objects are its furniture. As Heidegger said, objects are not “present-at-hand”, they are “ready-to-hand”, they are instruments of our being.

The being of the subject does not need an explanation. It is already presupposed. We only have to understand its internal structure. For that purpose we need philosophical and scientific methods like observation, logic, dialectic and phenomenology. In short: reflective thinking.

I would say that a quark, a vacuum, and the universe as a whole, as I define it, are clearly "things", they are objects for the subject and possible to describe with the language of physics. A thought is part of my relation to objects, so it is not a "thing". But a thought is an object of reflection, as the subject observes its own relation to the world. The subject can also be detected in reflection, as Descartes, for instance, found in his famous cogito. But the subject is not anything that can be described with the language of physics or with the language of psychology. That is what I mean by saying that it is transcendental. The subject is not an object. There is nothing "thing-like" in it. It is the ontological precondition of the being of all things and my relation to things.

We must make a distinction between objects of the world and objects of consciousness. When I see a tree, the tree is an object of the world, and my perception of the tree is an object of consciousness. When I reflect my relation to the world, for instance my perception of a tree, those relational elements become objects for the I, the transcendental subject. But the I is neither an object of the world nor an object of consciousness. It is something point-like, similar to what Wittgenstein spoke of in Tractatus. We can speak of objects of the world with the language of physics, we can speak of objects of consciousness with the language of psychology, but we can only refer to the transcendental subject with the language of philosophy. Even Descartes, after his famous insight of the being of cogito made the mistake of starting to speak of the soul as some kind of spiritual substance.

The word 'object' can certainly have many meanings, but what is essential is the subject-object relation that constitutes the basic ontological structure of reality. Words are words, but we must see the basic facts behind words, and define our words according to those facts.

An object of the world is some kind of a thing or stuff, but the transcendental subject is not stuff of any kind. This was the mistake of Descartes, too. Therefore it is clear that an object of the universe and the subject are radically different, because the being of the subject is an ontological precondition for the being of objects.

Naturalism says that there is no transcendent reality, only nature and its laws, and science explains everything by those laws. But in fact nature is transcendent, as opposed to immanence, and science describes the way it appears to us. And it does an excellent job. But science makes a fatal mistake if it tries to explain immanence, for instance consciousness, by transcendence, by the laws of nature, and even reduce everything to physics. This is a Münchhausen's trick and only leads to paradoxes and futile efforts.

Philosophy cannot start with nature, because that would mean a metaphysical commitment before starting. Philosophy starts with our immediate reality, seeking its ontological preconditions.

The terms 'transcendental' and 'transcendent' both express transcending our immediate experiences, 'transcendental' towards their subjective precondition and 'transcendent' towards objects “out there”. So ontologically they are opposites, and we should not confuse them.

The being of the transcendent world, or nature, and the transcendental Subject are the ontological preconditions of our immediate reality, our existence.

Being is. Non-being is not. These are tautologies.
So there is being.

The Subject is the Absolute. It is being itself. And non-being is not. So the Subject is causa sui, its being does not need an explanation. The Subject is very concrete: it is me, and it is each of us, at the moment of experiencing. It is what connects our individual beings so as to make one eternal stream of being. It is the point of reference to everything there is. It is transcendental, with no physical or psychological properties.

The Subject has an inner structure, and that structure can be known a priori. It is not easy, though. It is the task of philosophy. Science can help in the task, but does not lead us very far. That is because science is only interested in objects of the material world or objects of consciousness. The analysis of the Subject demands reflection, a phenomenological study of our being in the universe.

The basic components in the structure of the Subject are (1) time and (2) the Others.

Being is temporal.
Being is being of something.

The Subject is temporal. This means that I have now this experience and then another experience. There must have been the first experience, because if there were an experience before each experience, I could not be here now, in fact there could be no “now”. There cannot be the last experience, because that would mean that there would be non-being, which is absurd. So the Subject, or being, has had a beginning but will not have an end. This is the temporal structure of the Subject.

Time is not a continuum with sparkles of being here and there, so that now I exist and then I do not exist. There is no time outside of being, outside of the Subject. No being without time, no time without being.

That there cannot be an end of my existence, can be proved as follows:

1. If I did not exist, there would be nothing.
2. There is something, also after my death.
3. Therefore my nonexistence is impossible, also after my death.

As to the first premise: the existence of the world is put into "brackets", which is a common method in phenomenology. Then a question is asked: "What would be the state of the world if I did not exist?" And the answer is: "It would not exist, either." This is the key point. So in the first premise we ignore the obvious fact that the world will exist also after my death, which is expressed in the second premise. We are in front of a paradox, and the solution of the paradox is the conclusion attained in sentence 3 of the syllogism. Therefore we must make a distinction between the empirical subject and the transcendental Subject. The empirical, individual subject will vanish away, but the transcendental, metaphysical, absolute Subject is eternal. And all individual subjects are manifestations of this absolute Subject. It migrates through all of us.

The reader who does not see the truth of premise 1 may stop here, because in that case the rest of the story makes no sense. Premise 1 is an a priori truth, like the Cartesian cogito. Premise 2 is an empirical truth. The conclusion is pure logic.

But what is this “something” of being? In fact it seems that there cannot be anything, because there seems to be no reason for the being of anything.

Nevertheless, there is something, as we see.

Every experience has a content. A content can point at two directions: to a noumenon, a “thing-in-itself”, and to an earlier experience. The totality of noumena is the universe. A reference to an earlier experience is memory. Memory defines an individual subject. The Subject manifests itself as individual subjects. Death is forgetting: when the content of my present experience does not have any reference to any earlier experience, I am dead as one individual, being now another individual.

The being of the universe does not depend on the being of any particular individual subject. However, the being of the universe depends on the being of the Subject, and the being of the Subject depends on the being of the universe. There can be no universe without a point of view, the temporal present, the “here and now”. So the universe belongs to the inner structure of the Subject. The Subject is the reason for the being of the universe. And it is possible that all the details of the universe are predetermined by the inner logic of the Subject, although we will probably never fully understand that logic, in spite of the fact that everything in the universe happens for us. For we are the Subject. But is the Subject transparent to itself? Can it be? Perhaps transparency is the telos of the universe, never attained, the origin of the eternity of our being.

The universe is inhabited. It is the universe of Others. Others are individual subjects, like me. My being is being in relation to Others. There is a symmetric relation between me and the Others: I am also an Other and every Other is also I. My relation to Others is the universe. And because of the symmetric relation between me and the Others the universe is in fact my concrete relation to myself. This relation is material, because Others, having a spatial relation to me, must necessarily have the concreteness that shows itself as matter. In fact matter can be defined as the medium of my relation to Others. Matter is not the ontological basis for our existence, but is necessary for its concrete realization. Therefore Others, like me, must have bodies and minds. My mind is the subjective side of my relation to Others, and my body is its objective side, being on the same ontological level as the bodies of Others and the rest of the material universe. So mental and bodily events run parallel, being two conceptually incompatible levels of description of one and the same relation. Therefore trying to solve the so called mind-body problem by finding a conceptual bridge between matter and consciousness will never succeed, because there is no such bridge. There are only correlations between mind and body, and it is the task of science, not philosophy, to find them. There is no philosophical mind-body problem.

So I am the Others and the Others are I. But because I am now I and not an Other, the Others must be in my past or in my future. This means that we must understand in a new way the relation between subjective time and physical time, because my present, past and future can be simultaneous in physical time. This is a difficult problem, but there is no logical contradiction in it. It only means that everything must be strictly predetermined if I can meet my past and future in the world. But who is in my past and who is in my future? Or what? Probably we will never fully understand the logic of the Absolute, even in principle, because we are inevitably inside the universe, and we cannot jump outside of it to see what it looks like.

Because the being of the universe of Others is necessary for the being of the Subject, my death is inevitable for my transition to another individual subject.

All this means that the ontology of the Subject is a combination of solipsism and a modified theory of transmigration of the Self or I, a combination that removes the logical inconsistencies of both theories. All experiences are my experiences. There are no foreign experiences. The present, the “here and now”, wanders through reality adopting all the manifestations of the Subject in the form of individual subjects, successively, each at its proper time, being born, living and dying, eternally.

Now we see the rationality of the “something”. Being explains itself from within. Being is really nothing but my relation to myself and the “something” is the tautological “being is” or “I am”. The Subject has to understand itself, find itself, be transparent to itself, in order to be in balance with itself, because there is nothing else, and there must be something to guarantee its being. And it must be, because non-being is not. Therefore it has to be in relation to itself, being its own object, as mind and body, seeking the balance of being. But the realization of this requires the whole universe with all its structures and evolutionary processes. This is the essence of the idea that the universe is inhabited, the universe of Others. And this is also the spatial structure of the Subject, seen as I and the Others in the universe.

So the Subject is temporal and spatial: eternal as subjective time, and migrating through all individual subjects in the space-time of the universe.

Now we can define being as the Subject's relation to itself, realized by nature. And nature is nothing more than the universe that modern physics so brilliantly describes. So there is nothing mystical in all this: only an ontological interpretation of known facts.

The idea behind the metaphysical hypothesis that I am also the Others is very clear but so embarrassing that I have hesitated to present it to anybody. However, if the hypothesis is true, it resolves many existential paradoxes, including the paradox of death and the paradox of foreign minds, as shown above. It is also a solid basis for ethics. Unfortunately the only way to verify or falsify the hypothesis is to think clearly.

Whether being ever becomes transparent to itself, gaining balance and peace in understanding itself, remains an open question. We have always dreamed of an everlasting heaven, paradise or nirvana, but maybe the logic of being does not fulfill our dreams, especially as death is unavoidable. Perhaps the myth of Sisyphus gives us a more realistic picture of our existential situation. Climbing up and falling down, never reaching the top. Or reaching it, understanding everything, and then forgetting all, having to start from zero. Or perhaps the balance is in the seeking, and we are like birds sleeping in the wind. Who knows.

Whatever our fate will be, all we have is the future. Here and now.

As I wrote, premise 1 is not an empirical statement, nor is it something that can be proved in logic. It is an a priori statement, totally independent of the obvious fact that others are still there after my death. You only need to see its truth, as Descartes saw the truth of his 'I am'. So it is, unfortunately. And the conclusion solves the paradox inherent in it.

I do not deny the obvious fact that my death does not make the world nonexistent. I only claim that this fact has logical consequences. Would you say that the Cartesian 'I am' is not an obvious a priori truth? My premise 1 is something like that, perhaps a bit more difficult to see, as it seems, but very clear and obvious when you see it. And this has nothing to do with religion.

The being of the world depends on the being of the transcendental subject, and therefore my non-being coincides with the non-being of everything. But my non-being is impossible, and that saves the world from vanishing when I die. My premise 1 proves that there must be the transcendental subject.

Descartes did not really conclude anything, he detected the transcendental subject. But he draw the false conclusion that there is a substance he called res cogitans. There is no such thing, only pure subjectivity with no properties, a point of view to the world. And this is the insight that inspired Husserl and others to develop the phenomenological method in philosophy.

Empirical science tries to make a coherent picture of how nature appears to us. Philosophy tries to make a coherent picture of the appearing itself, as it appears to us in reflection. So philosophy is a reflective science. Empirical science studies the world, philosophy studies our being in the world.

There has been discussion about the possibility of there being a universe without subjects, without a single 'I'. What can be said of such a universe? Nothing, because there would be no one to say anything. But we can say something of it, namely that such a universe can exist, can't we? Yes, but that would be an abstraction of a universe. Every concrete possible universe must have a reference point for which it is a universe. In this sense the being of the world and experiencing the world depend on each other. Being and knowing are not so separate phenomena as we often think nowadays. This is one meaning of the concept of transcendental subject. Without it everything melts into nothingness and absurdity. Why should we assume that there can be something self-contradictory?

I remember that more than once someone said it is very easy to imagine a universe without subjects. But I think in this case 'easy' means 'superficial'.

Whenever I say: “A universe without subjects is possible”, I deny what I say. But I can say: “If I did not exist, and if there were no other subjects either, the universe could still exist.” But to say this I must exist, and therefore the sentence is pure nonsense. We have no meaningful way of saying that a universe without subjects is possible. Therefore it is not possible. The universe is our universe, and we cannot leave it to its own absurd existence even if we wanted to.

What I am saying is something similar to the metaphysical subject of Tractatus and what I have called the transcendental subject, borrowing that concept from well-known sources. So I am not speaking about an empirical, individual subject, but claiming that there must be some kind of a reference point in order for there to be a world at all. It is true that I have pushed the concept of the metaphysical 'I' somewhat further than Kant, Husserl and Wittgenstein, up to the premise that says "If I did not exist, there would be nothing". But anyway, it is not a question of my personal being that makes the world nonexistent, no one can seriously think that way. Instead, I see the transcendental subject as a precondition not only of knowing but also of all being whatsoever. It is an ontological concept.

Let us take the sentence "The being of the world is independent of my being", which seems to be true and obvious: the world is "out there", independent of my being. But out of what? Independent of what? My being, of course, and the being of each of us. So these phrases express a relation, and one member of the relation is my being. If we remove that part from the relation, nothing is left. Now we come to the sentence "If I did not exist, there would be nothing", which is the clue for all these considerations. These are much more than word games, they reveal something essential in our reality.

So now we have proved the sentence "If I did not exist..." formally, using a kind of dialectic, but in fact it can be seen a priori and very clearly, in a phenomenological intuition, if you think of it thoroughly and not just in an everyday manner.

Now we all know that when others die, the world does not end, nor does it end when I die. So we must conclude that dying does not mean nothingness, not even my nothingness. Therefore we must conclude that the subject is something deeper than my individual subject, it is transcendental. And what is important, the transcendental subject is transpersonal: it only manifests itself as individual subjects. Only in this way the world remains when I die. The subject-object relation is fundamental. Wherever there is being, there is a subject for which that being is.

Let us consider the monads of Leibniz. They are "soul-like", he says. Let us assume that they are individual subjects. A monad expresses all other monads. If one monad is removed, the world continues its being as before, but it is always there from the point of view of some monad.

So can you really imagine a universe without subjects?

I did not say: "If others do not exist, nothing exists", or "If I as an individual subject do not exist, nothing exists". These are empirical statements, and anyone can see that they are false. I said "If I did not exist, there would be nothing", and this does not mean that when I die there will be nothing. This is an a priori statement, seemingly in conflict with facts but its truth can be seen very clearly though not perhaps very easily. And the conclusion is what I have presented. So if you can read elementary logic, the syllogism goes like this: (1) p->q (2) not q (3) not p, where (3) is the conclusion. The controversy is about (1), and it seems that the question about its truth must be left open, because it requires the kind of insight that cannot be pushed into anyone's mind with words.

I think sometimes we have nothing but those clear ideas that Spinoza, for instance, appealed to as adequate sources of knowledge. Then the problem is how we can make someone else think in the same way. As we know, this was the case also for Wittgenstein who wrote in the preface of Tractatus that his thoughts can probably be understood only by someone who has had same kind of thoughts.

My language is more like descriptive than precise. So I find no problem in writing of 'universes without subjects', 'essential properties of reality' etc. I only hope the message will be understood so that someone starts to think of things from the same horizon as I do, for a moment at least. To see things in a different way. To express thoughts in philosophy is always a problem, and someone has said that philosophical discussion is impossible because we speak of different things. Our horizons of thinking are so different.

Wittgenstein wrote that in dying the world does not change but ceases. It sort of vanishes as a whole. And this is exactly what I mean by the sentence "If I did not exist, there would be nothing". The world will very concretely pass into nothingness. And this contradicts the empirical fact that when others die and when I, as an individual, die, the world does not end or vanish. This is why we need a deeper idea of the subject. I also find a deeper idea in the nothingness that follows my nonexistence than mere silence and refusing to speak about the unspeakable. But I understand that most people do not see it in the way I do, because they have not had the concrete insight behind my thinking.

I have never understood why there should be features in our existence that language is incapable of expressing. Language is very rich and contains infinite possibilities of expanding into new territories. Wittgenstein spoke of the unspeakable in Tractatus and we understand what he meant, more or less. He did not want to use metaphysical language games in his later writings. Why? Heidegger wrote somewhat poetically in Being and Time and even more poetically in What is Metaphysics, and studied questions like “Why is there something rather than nothing”, giving a very poetic definition of nothingness. But all in all, I think there are existential paradoxes, like death and foreign minds, that are worth giving a phenomenological “sight”, because they are concrete questions with concrete answers if we look at them close enough. Our understanding evolves through hermeneutic spirals, and what now seems impossible to speak about, may be clear to everybody some day. Language can be an instrument of understanding and seeing, not only of describing facts. Scientific language is not the only way of using language.

Heidegger's project in Being and Time was to find the meaning of being. He started with the analysis of the meaning of the being of Dasein (“being here” or “being there”) and left open the question if there are other kinds of being and if there is a meaning of being in general. After going deeper in the analysis, ending with the meaning of Dasein as temporality, he asked if the meaning of being in general could be found in temporality, time interpreted as the phenomenological idea of “subjective” time, from which physical time can be constructed as a secondary phenomenon. So it seems to me that he concluded that the meaning of being in general is essentially the same as the meaning of the being of Dasein, or at least founded on that. I am not sure if my interpretation is correct or even near to correct, but it is something similar to what I think myself. There are questions left open with this interpretation, such as the subjectivity of animals and what is its relation to the meaning of the being of Dasein as it is described by Heidegger, which probably cannot be applied to the being of animals.

My interpretation is that the objects of the world are "ready-to-hand" and that Heidegger abandoned the "present-at-hand" nature of them altogether, but I may be wrong in this. For objects to be "present-at-hand" we must take a peculiar attitude towards them, sort of stare at them, which was the problem also with Wittgenstein in Tractatus, and which he later confessed to have been his mistake.

The point is that we cannot know what will happen to us, because knowing and doing are incompatible. Therefore, if something like determinism were a meaningful concept, there has to be some kind of a metaphysical reason to use it. I am not sure if it is totally meaningless.

Wittgenstein's lecture on ethics is interesting. I am not sure if I can fully agree with him when he says that ethics cannot be expressed with words. As I have said, there are many ways of using language, and many of us has spoken about the ”unspeakable”. Why not be a bit poetic sometimes? Why not say that our existence is paradoxical? Or that it is a great wonder that there is a world around us? If they convey some change of attitude in us, why should we not use those ”nonsensical” phrases. Poetry has its own kind of truth.

What is that God anyway? We have carried that concept with us thousands of years having no clear idea of what we are talking about. But the word means something, and something very important, just because we have had it as long as we can see into our history. It is the unspeakable meaning of our existence, something we are dependent on. We cannot get a grip of God any more than we can get a grip of death. So God, if we want to use that concept, is the unspeakable depth of our existence. For Spinoza it was Nature. For Wittgenstein it was the world of facts and the metaphysical subject, so he had two gods. For our generation it may be the universe with its laws. So why not God, we only have to get rid of the dogmas of our religions.

God, if we use that concept, is not something that exists or something that does not exist. God, seen as above, is beyond all proofs. Faith in such a God can be illustrated by quoting Kafka, who wrote that "even if one crow can easily cover the sky, that is not a proof against the sky". Cf. the holocaust.

Consciousness is fundamental, i.e. it comes ontologically, or should we say ”logically”, first, but not, of course, physically, in the space-time of the universe. This needs no concept of God to support it.

Our immediate reality, immanence, or consciousness, is such that it has always a relation to transcendence, objects "out there", but we can never say what those objects are like. We can make good and exact descriptions of them, like modern physics with its amazingly accurate theories, but nevertheless they are just descriptions of how objects appear to us. So it is true that in this sense it is meaningless to speak of the nature of objects as they are "in themselves". But if there were no objects, we would not exist either. And if we did not exist, there would be no objects. So the subject-object relation is ontologically fundamental.

Being ontologically fundamental has nothing to do with time. We should see the universe as a totality with consciousness or subjectivity being its essential and unremovable element.

“How do I prove my existence?” If put this way the question contains the answer. No proof is needed. My existence is already presupposed.

But I can ask if it is possible for me to exist or not to exist. In other words: am I some kind of a thing with properties, so that when those properties are removed I cease to exist? And if that “thing” did not exist, I did not exist.

And indeed, I as an individual subject with this body and these memories, will cease to exist, and it is easy to imagine that I with these properties were not born at all. This is what we call the empirical subject.

But instead of thinking of myself as a bundle of properties it is possible to think of myself as the subject of those properties, and that I could as well be the subject of other properties, being another individual. This is the transcendental subject, or at least my version of it. I think it is transpersonal, point-like, with no internal properties.

I think there is no "thinker" or subject which is a "thing" or substance. The identity of an individual subject is an interesting question, and I think it is connected with memory. But I also think that there must be a point-like transcendental subject with no properties, a universal self that connects all individual subjects to a common stream of being. It is much like the metaphysical I of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, although I have made more far-reaching metaphysical conclusions from its necessity.

I think philosophy must start with immanence, not transcendence. Nature is transcendent, and what nature is, philosophically, can only be found out by a phenomenological analysis of our being in the world. This analysis reveals much more than the empirical world that science is interested in. Science cannot deal with our subjectivity, it is not within its realm of study. That is why we need philosophy.

'I' denotes both an empirical subject and the transcendental subject, and we usually confuse those two.

The idea of my version of the transcendental subject is that the present moment which I am experiencing just now and which is constantly changing to another experience has had a long history of experiential events and will have an endless future of them. And we are all part of that history. So there is no repetition of the same events. I must admit that this may seem paradoxical and surely leads to many oddities, and in the end is something that is impossible to express with language. In fact if you want to understand what I mean, you should put language into "brackets" and only think about your own existence: where you came from, where you will go after your death and so on. You should forget the world around you. Then it is perhaps possible, in favorable circumstances, to get some deep insights that changes your way of seeing the world. But it is beyond language, beyond all this what I am trying to explain. Like Wittgenstein's ”ladder” this text is only a way of trying to lead to a new way of seeing the world and especially our existence in relation to the world and at the same time as part of the world.

And why is this all beyond language? Because when we write to each other, we are supposed to be two separate subjects, and we cannot get rid of that situation. That we are both part of the same stream of existence cannot be expressed in our writing to each other, in spite of my trying to do so now. Paradoxical?

In my being in the world I meet things like water and, if I am a physicist, hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and I can see the connection between them. This is pure physics.

But as an individual subject who can say 'I am...' I also meet other individual subjects who can say 'I am...' and it is only by saying 'I am...' that the other is a subject for me. So the situation is totally different from the case of water and its atoms. The other is a subject whose subjectivity is absent for me. I cannot see the other's subjectivity, I only know he/she is a subject because we have a common language. And there is no conceptual bridge between the other as a subject and the brain events of the other, any more than there is a bridge between my experiences and my brain events. There are only correlations between the other's words and what happens in his/her brain.

That the other is absent as an other means that subjectivity is essentially private, and this privacy means that it is in principle impossible to explain contents of experience or qualia by brain events. In fact the concept of 'content' alone should prove its impossibility.

There are correlations or relations of correspondence between consciousness and brain events. The correspondence may be one-to-one, but contents of consciousness are not the same as brain events. They are what constitutes our relation to the material world. They are the immanent part of that relation, whereas brain events are its transcendent, material part. Spinoza was not far from truth when he said that the body is the object of the mind.

The content of consciousness has a basis in brain events, but the subject is there already, as if waiting for something to happen, and the metaphor of a point that Leibniz and Wittgenstein used is a good one. The subject only uses a body as its instrument of being. We are not our bodies.

I would say that consciousness is already there at the big bang as a potential that actualizes itself during the evolution of cosmos and life. The material universe realizes that evolution, because it needs a concrete basis. But the primus motor of everything is subjectivity or consciousness which has to become a real being and which is the reason and meaning of the being of the universe. Without it everything would be absurd, if it were possible to be anything at all in such a case. So the basic structure of reality is the subject-object relation, and if the subject were removed, also the object would vanish, and with it everything. So reality is not a monistic field of matter but a relation: our relation to the world or our being in the world in the way Heidegger saw it.

Of course there were no actual conscious beings at the big bang, only a potential for them. But the potentiality of them is fundamental and is the reason for the existence of the universe.

I do not see subjects as material entities. When I say that the potential for consciousness has been there since the big bang I mean that the potential for the being of subjects of consciousness has been there since the big bang, so that the principle of subjectivity has always been there. By 'the subject' I meant subjectivity, the potential for there being individual subjects.

I have said many times that I do not see consciousness as any kind of substance or substrate. Consciousness is the immanent side of the relation of the subject to the material world, and therefore it is on a different ontological level than the body, but it is not a spiritual stuff of any kind. In fact, because of the correlation between body and mind, they can also be thought of as the same thing seen from two different perspectives, so that they are two conceptually incompatible levels of description of the same relation. If we say that our brain creates our consciousness, it is true in the sense that the material world is the basis for its being, but there is no conceptual bridge between the two. Immanence and transcendence can never be on the same level of description. Consciousness is close to us ontologically, it is our immediate reality, whereas our brain is part of the transcendent world. Our brains, our bodies and the rest of the material universe are objects of consciousness, and consciousness cannot be explained by its objects. Consciousness is fundamental although it needs the whole material universe for its being.

There are causal relations both ways, and dependencies, or an identity of body and mind, but it is an identity of a relation which is fundamental, the relation of the subject to the material universe. And that relation has two sides, the subjective side which we call consciousness, and the objective or material side which we call the body, and those two sides speak totally different languages. And the subject is the key for all this. Without it everything would vanish away. The universe is there for the subject.

I am experiencing the universe, directly or indirectly, and without my being in the universe there is no universe. Even the big bang has been there because I am now experiencing something that has a spatio-temporal connection to it. And when I die, there will be others to experience the universe. My personal non-being does not change the situation which constitutes the basic structure of reality: the subject-object relation. The subject is always there already, wherever it happens to be concretely. As I said, without it everything would vanish away. I do not see why this seems to be so difficult to understand. For me it is self-evident.

What physicalism in fact claims is that everything is transcendent. For that is what physics is all about: it tries to describe in a logically consistent way how transcendent reality, the material world, appears to us. And it does a good job in doing that. But physics, as well as physicalism, forgets to ask what transcendence is. It forgets that transcendence is transcendence only in relation to immanence, our immediate reality, subjectivity, or consciousness. Physicalism makes the fatal mistake of trying to explain subjectivity by the objects of that very same subjectivity. This is a Münchhausen's trick, trying to lift oneself by one's own hair. Nobody believed him, but some of us still believe in physicalism. It is a metaphysical belief, a blind commitment to an ontological position that works well in physics, biology and even neuroscience, which are its own territory, but fails totally if it tries to extend itself to psychology or analysis of subjectivity and consciousness as they immediately present themselves in us.

What is ontologically closest to us makes us often blind.

I am not a subjective idealist. I am saying that the being of subjects depends on the being of the material universe, and the being of the material universe depends on the being of subjectivity - but not on the being of any individual subject of course, only on the being of whatever experiencing subjects that bring the rationality and meaning of being with them. I do not believe in an absurd universe, especially as it is evident that such a universe cannot exist. An uninhabited universe is self-contradictory when you think of it thoroughly. As I said, looking close is sometimes very difficult.

Another point: if science one day detects consciousness in our brains, how can it claim it is consciousness that it has found? Consciousness is private by definition! This is also valid concerning the question of possible consciousness in robots. The only way the existence of consciousness can be verified in an organism or computer is through the common language we have or certain features of behavior, but never looking into our brains or the algorithms of our computers.

A thought experiment:

Imagine you are observing your brain. You see what happens in your brain as you are looking at it. You see the neurological correlates of your seeing your brain. But if physicalism is true, what you should in fact see there is the content of seeing, your perception of your brain. But of course you cannot see it, not even a delayed version of it. That would be absurd. You are it, at the moment it is experienced. Now we see the relation of mind and brain and the impossibility of applying physicalism to consciousness.

Consciousness is consciousness of transcendent, material objects. This is the basic structure of our being in the world. And we cannot break this structure, look at it from outside and try to explain consciousness of objects by the objects themselves. We are not gods.

Material objects, the Kantian noumena, need explaining, but consciousness of those objects, our immediate reality, cannot and need not be explained. Transcendence needs explanation, immanence needs phenomenological analysis. This is what Husserl so clearly saw.

There is a parallelism between mind and brain a´la Spinoza, but for him they were different attributes of the same substance, not explainable one by the other. If science tries to find an explaining bridge between them it will certainly fail. It is like trying to save physicalism by building "epicycles" between physics and psychology. The truth is much simpler: there is no scientific problem with consciousness.

If I watch my brain in action, I have a perception of my brain in action. I also have a perception of my perception of my brain in action as I reflect my watching. Now physicalistic neuroscience tries to build a conceptual, explaining bridge between the objects of those two perceptions. I see this as very odd and complicated thinking, and condemned to fail because it is based on a false ontology that only leads to logical inconsistencies and absurdities. Immanence cannot be explained by transcendence. It is as simple as that.

My view is based on the rejection of a metaphysical dogma called materialism. It is based on the original insights of Descartes, Kant, Husserl et al. that our immediate reality is the starting point of all serious philosophy. We cannot start with transcendence. It is precisely because of this that the material world needs explaining but our immediate reality needs another kind of analysis. That psychological phenomena have a material basis and in a way can be explained by them does not mean that they are on the same ontological level of being as the material world. Explaining in this sense means finding correlations and we can also speak of causation here, but in that case we have no problem: we only have to go on finding more correlations. This is the key to the fact that the being of consciousness can never be explained by material phenomena on a common conceptual framework. The bridge is not there, and there is nothing from which it could appear.

Mind and body can be ontologically identical in the way Spinoza saw them as two attributes of one substance, but there is no way of explaining the being of consciousness by physics or neuroscience. The problem of what consciousness is cannot be solved by science. It is a philosophical problem, and my philosophy says that there is no problem of its being, only of its structure and relation to the world.

If the physical world transcends consciousness, how can consciousness be immanent in the physical world?

There must necessarily be the potential of subjectivity already in the universe even before it becomes actual, and it also must become actual. That potentiality is the ontological precondition of the being of the universe. A universe without inhabitants is impossible. I see the universe as an organism with no actual subjects at its early phases, but evolving towards conscious states of individual subjects, like an embryo which only becomes conscious when its time comes. The philosophical problem is the relation of the material universe to the various modes that subjectivity adopts in the form of individual subjects during cosmic and biological evolution. But there is no problem as to the essence of subjectivity or consciousness, only as to its structure, i.e. its relation to the world. The task of philosophy is reflective: it has to study our being in the world in the way e.g. Husserl and Heidegger have done. And then we can go further and step into the dangerous stream of speculative metaphysics, however keeping in mind that we do not ignore empirical evidence and logic.

I am an epistemic realist and an ontological idealist, thinking that the subject-object relation is ontologically fundamental, but the being of the material universe is independent of the being of an individual subject with its perceptions and other experiences. The big bang was there in spite of the fact that no one was witnessing it. But someone has witnessed, is witnessing or will witness something somewhere. A universe empty of subjects is no universe but an absurdity. And I do not believe in the existence of absurdities or in the existence of nothingness. Reductio ad absurdum.

There is no "hard problem" of consciousness, except in the minds of some materialists, and failing to solve this pseudo problem does not speak for the fruitfulness of materialistic ontology.

The transcendental subject is not supernatural, it is the ontological precondition of nature itself. And it was detected by Descartes, Kant, Husserl, Wittgenstein and others, perhaps with slightly different interpretations. It was also behind Heidegger's Dasein, although he criticized Husserl's interpretation of it. In fact it is quite easy to detect with a little step of reflection. But I have never seen anyone detect a material subject, unless it is a material organism interpreted as subject, which has nothing to do with subjectivity.

The transcendental subject is the 'I' of the 'I am such and such'. The 'such and such' varies in the universe, but the 'I' does not change or cease to be. It is the permanent reference point of our changing experiences of the world.

The ”hard problem” is based on a false ontology, and seeing that removes the problem altogether. I do not think there is any kind of soul substance. Consciousness is fundamental and original. It is already there, so it needs no generation from any sort of spiritual stuff. There is no such stuff. Consciousness, being already there, is consciousness of the world, that is all. That makes the situation so simple that only physicalists find it difficult.

There is some truth in the view that consciousness is a flowing bundle of ideas. But it is also true that there must be something to keep those ideas together to make them my ideas. And this something is exactly the transcendental or metaphysical subject that Wittgenstein spoke of in Tractatus. Metaphorically it is, as he said, "a point along which the world gets coordinated". I have gone somewhat further than him, and that is what I mean by 'speculative metaphysics'. But there is nothing mystical in the concept of transcendental or metaphysical I: it is each of us as the experiencer, not as an individual or empirical subject. It is not an abstraction, it is very concrete, and detectable in reflection. We only have to look closer and forget the world around us for a moment.

The basic ontological structure of reality is the relation of the subject to objects of the material world. This relation is expressed by my immediate reality or consciousness as the subjective side of it, and my body as the objective side of it. This means that my body and my mind are parallel but conceptually incompatible ways of seeing one and the same basic relation. So my immediate reality, immanence, gets transcended in two directions: the world and the subject. I am conscious of the world by my body, and the elements of this relation are: (1) I, the transcendental subject (2) my individual consciousness (3) my body, as part of the material world. The subject, the 'I', has nothing to do with matter or any other substance or substrate. It is the original and eternal point of view to the world, where the 'point' is permanent and without inner structure, but the 'view' changes all the time along with the 'world'.

My epistemic conclusion is that consciousness can never find a cause or reason for its own being, and my ontological conclusion is that there is no cause or reason for its being.

The universe is my universe. It does not vanish when I die, but if I cease to exist, there is no universe, and has never been, for that would be the end of time, and the past is the past of the present.

So there is a paradox here, and the paradox cannot be resolved by saying that the universe is still there for the others, because the others are only others for me. This is the very definition of 'other'.

The logical conclusion seems to be that my death has nothing to do with my existence.

The universe of my yesterday is no more my universe, but the universe is still my universe, the universe of my present. In the same way when I am dead the dead person's universe is no more my universe, but the universe must still be my universe if it is the universe at all.

I have tried to solve this paradox by some metaphysical considerations elsewhere.

About “given as” and “taken as”: If we say that objects of the world are taken as something, we presuppose some kind of freedom of action, which brings to mind Sartre, for example. If we say that they are given as something, we presuppose some kind of Logos or God or a deep reality that is totally independent of our decisions. I am inclined to assume the latter standpoint, but so that the Logos or Absolute is not something transcendent but immanent in us. Reality happens to us, not because some transcendent being or principle has determined everything, but because the Logos is in us, as something that determines what must happen. Or better still: we are the Logos, evolving as an intersubjective community that reveals its own being and the being of the world in a hermeneutic spiral.

By the way, although Wittgenstein's metaphysical 'I' is independent of what the world is like, the being of the 'I' depends on the being of the world and the being of the world depends on the being of the 'I'. Perhaps he did not say this, but it is a direct consequence of what he said. And this is a good starting point of developing some interesting metaphysics.

What transcends the spiral is what keeps the spiral going and also what has started the movement of the spiral if there has been a beginning. And indeed, it is within the spiral, not outside, not transcendent but transcendental, as I understand that term. But the next question is: are we in the world or does the world belong to our ontological "structure", or are both only complementary ways of saying the same thing?

From Tractatus:

6.43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax or wane as a whole.
The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy.

I must confess that I have never fully understood what he means. There is a remark in Zettel where he says that it is very natural for him to think that all our inner states or experiences need not have physiological correlates. I think the above says the same thing. But I think he is wrong: there are certainly physiological differences between the happy and the unhappy, not to mention differences between someone suffering pain and someone not suffering pain. And physiology if anything belongs to the world. But perhaps he meant something else.

So ethics in this sense is connected to the world, but it does not mean that our basic experiences, pain and happiness for instance, are ontologically something secondary and explainable by material events. They are the origin of all meaning, not ineffable in the sense that they can be expressed by language, being perhaps the very origin of language. But what is the origin of these basic experiences? What is the origin of evil? Now we come to the basic ontological structure of reality: the subject-object relation. The subject, which is the primus motor of everything, and which therefore cannot be eliminated from the picture, cannot exist without the world. Therefore it has to be in relation to the world, and with this original relation there emerges pain, happiness, unhappiness and other basic experiences that constitute our meaningful being in the world.

I would say that the 'I', being “metaphysical”, point-like, without internal properties, must be the permanent reference point of the world, whatever the world is like. So it is independent of facts but dependent on the being of the world, whatever the world is like. And what is also important: there cannot be a world without this 'I', so that the subject-object relation is fundamental whatever the objects are. And we can develop this further, despite the anti-metaphysical attitude of Wittgenstein.

I tend to disagree with Wittgenstein on the transcendental nature of ethics and its independence of facts. Ethics comes into the picture as we meet the world, and we meet the world with our bodies, which makes the facts of the world change all the time. But I am an ontological idealist and think that what we are as experiencing subjects is the clue and essence of everything there is, the dominant part of the subject-object relation. But this leads us into the depths of metaphysics again.

What is can always be taken in various ways, it is not transparent in this sense. That is why there is such a thing as science. What is transcends what we know. The world is transcendent. Ontology, if it does not coincide with epistemic idealism, recognizes this. But ontological idealism is not in conflict with epistemic realism. Even if there is something we never know, it is there in relation to the subject that experiences something here and now. It is outside of this “here and now”, but this “here and now”, this present experience must exist for there to be something outside of it.

We are individual subjects and we are not eternal, so the world is independent of our personal existence, but its being depends on the present experience of a subject, whoever or whatever that subject happens to be. I have used the terms 'subjectivity' and 'the subject' as synonyms to denote the experiencer as opposed to an individual, empirical subject with this particular body and these particular memories, and it is on this subjectivity that the being of the world depends on, not on me as an individual person.

And if we like to go into metaphysical speculation, as I do, we can speculate on what connects individual subjects to subjectivity in general and to each other. But that is another story.

By Logos I mean our immanent ability to make sense of our existence and the world around us. Science can only produce facts and put them into a logical framework, although it belongs to the same ability. But, as Wittgenstein says in Tractatus:

6.52 We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered,
the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course
there is then no question left, and just this is the answer.

Science cannot help us understand our existence: why are we here, why is there a world at all, what is consciousness and so on. I do not know if 'Logos' is the proper concept here, but I mean something that gives us transparency of our existence so that we end up seeing that our being in the world does not need an explanation any more. Reality is causa sui.

It is absurd to think of a world with its logic without an 'I'. Wittgenstein says that logic does not precede the “what”, only the “how”. How can there be logic without the subject?

My ontological standpoint is that the being of the subject is fundamental and that the subject manifests itself as individual subjects. And an individual subject need not be aware of everything for there being the basic subject-object relation as an ontological precondition for the being of the world.

I think the word 'I' denotes two things: an individual, empirical subject and the transcendental subject that only happens to be this empirical subject.

I interpret Wittgenstein so that the world is there with its logic and always with an 'I' whose world it is. So it is independent of a particular empirical subject but depends on subjectivity because the world is always my world, whoever that 'I' happens to be. The being of the world, the being of logic and the being of the metaphysical subject are equiprimordial.

The world is transcendent and some parts or features of it may remain unknown for ever, but even if they remain unknown, they remain unknown for immanence, for subjectivity, for us, whoever is experiencing something in the world. A universe without subjects who bring meaning to it would be something that is impossible to think about without contradicting oneself. Its impossibility can be proved by a reductio ad absurdum.

There is no separate empirical subject, only a manifestation of the transcendental subject which happens to have this body and these memories. I think memory is the crucial phenomenon that defines an individual.

My view is: the 'I' is in no space at all, because it is transcendental, but it is always there as an ontological precondition of the being of the world.

When Wittgenstein says that the world is my world and logic is the precondition of the being of the world for me, he describes the concrete reality. If he had said that there is a world, and logic is the precondition of its being, that would have been an abstraction. The world in itself is an abstraction, a prejudice of materialism. The concrete reality is my existence in the world or, if we bring intersubjectivity to the expression, our being in the world. If we remove the 'my' or 'our', nothing is left. Here is the absurdum.

To sum up: The world is transcendent. Transcendence is transcendence for us. Belief in transcendence in itself has no justification, because we are not in a position to say anything about it.

The universe is conscious because we are in the universe. By 'we' I mean all the individual subjects in the universe. The universe is essentially our universe. When we speak of the universe we have already presupposed the speaker, and even if we say that the being of the universe is independent of our being we have already presupposed our being. So there is no way of speaking meaningfully of the universe in itself. As we try to speak of it, we find that we are speaking of the universe we are in. We cannot eliminate ourselves from the picture. And there is no justification for positing something we cannot speak of in principle. What cannot be spoken of cannot be posited. However, this is exactly what materialism does. Therefore it is logically inconsistent.

What I am saying here has nothing to do with God. This is phenomenological ontology. Philosophy must start with immanence, our immediate reality, and if there is transcendence found as a result of the phenomenological analysis of immanence, like the transcendence of the material world, this is only a result, not the starting point. Therefore naturalism cannot be the starting point of philosophy. Philosophy must explain itself and nature, although this is an ambitious task.

We must assume that the basic structures of consciousness are common to us. And we can reach them by our common language, because the structures of language express those structures. The chair you are sitting on is transcendent, and its transcendence can also be seen through phenomenological intuition if it is not clear already.

If naturalism is defined as the rejection of supernatural reality, then I think it is compatible with phenomenology. But if it says that philosophy must take as its starting point the reality that empirical science deals with, without questioning its justification, then it is, in my opinion, against the principles of phenomenology. This is where we come to such pseudo problems as the "hard problem" of consciousness, problems that have their origin in committing to a false ontology.

By God we usually mean the cause or reason for our existence. As the cause of our existence God is the universe seen as a totality. As the reason for our existence God must be identified with the Self, because reasons can only be for the Self. And the conclusion of all this is that the Self is the reason for the being of the universe and itself.

I think death is forgetting. When I am dead, I do not remember who I was. I will be another. And I think Heraclitus was right: I cannot step twice into the same stream. There is only one Self that goes through all individual lives. But I cannot step into another's life when I am who I am, only afterwards.

There may be various definitions of substance. This is Spinoza's definition in Ethics:

By substance, I mean that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.

According to this definition neither matter nor mind can be substance, because they are interdependent. The concrete reality is the subject-object relation. Spinoza says that mind and body are attributes of one and the same substance which he calls Nature or God, and the body is the object of the mind.

When I see a tree, physical causality goes from the tree to my brain with photons hitting my retina and so on. This chain of events is expressed as my perception of the tree. If this is called causation is a matter of definition, but it is not physical causation. The same applies when I do something because I want to do it.

But the point is that my perception of a tree is not located in physical spacetime, not even in my brain. It is part of my subjective world and subjective time where I am conscious of the physical world.

Physical causation happens within the physical world: tree-photons-retina-brain. My perception is not really caused by these in the physical sense of the term, but goes parallel with them, being an expression of them. My perception is not conceptually compatible with the physical events that "cause" them in another meaning of the term. And therefore there cannot be a mechanism that would connect them. The physical events are the necessary material conditions for the perception. The "mind/body" problem is a pseudo problem. My view is that it is caused by unjustified commitment to materialistic ontology.

My being in the world means that I am related to the material universe by being conscious of it. The subjective side of this relation is my consciousness or mind, and its objective side is my body. But the relation is one and the same, only seen from two perspectives. So the relation is not one of causation but identity, only seen from two conceptually incompatible points of view. When photons hit my retina, they cause something to happen in my body, and I experience this effect as seeing a tree, for instance. So there is no link, no bridge, between body and mind. The subject-object relation is fundamental. This is how I see the situation.

It is an interesting question whether quantum mechanics has something to do with the fact that our decisions and doings go parallel with and in this sense have an effect on the material world. I have not a clear answer to this. But I think the physical effects cannot happen against the laws of physics.

The subject-object relation is fundamental, and both sides are equally original ontologically, though not in physical spacetime. So awareness does not arise from matter, it only needs matter for its basis of being. Therefore I do not ask what makes a physical system have an internal awareness, but what must the physical system be like in order for me to be conscious of it. This is my version of the mind/body problem.

My subjective time is a series of presents or “nows” that constantly change their mode of being from present to past, as new presents replace them from the future. There must have been the first “now”, for if there had been a “now” before each “now”, I could not be here now: there could not be the “now” I am experiencing at present. There cannot be the last “now”, because this would mean that there would be non-being: if I did not exist, there would be nothing, which would be absurd and self-contradictory. So my subjective time has a beginning and no end. There is a parallel to this in cosmology, where the universe has started from zero, the singularity we know as the Big Bang, and will possibly expand with no end.

Now I have described my subjective time where my experiences of the world follow each other without an end. But are there other subjective times, times of others? I do not think so. For terms like 'subjective' and 'experience' denote 'my subjectivity' and 'my experiences'. If there were experiences that I never experience, it would be the same as saying that there is something which is not there. As I said, there can be experiences that are not here and now, being in the past or future, but they must nevertheless be experiences in relation to my present experience, so that I have had them in the past or will have them in the future. So the others' experiences must be in my past or in my future. This is the solution for the paradox of foreign minds.

And who is this 'I'? I am not only my body, my genetic code and my memories. I can be whatever body, whatever genetic code, whoever's memories. So I am something that transcends my personal identity: I am the transcendental subject that manifests itself as every individual subject in the cosmic space-time, each in its proper time. And because this flow of existence is endless, there are no loops in it: I cannot step twice into the same stream.

This is metaphysical speculation, but it solves the paradox of death and the paradox of foreign minds or foreign experiences.

This is all beyond language and can only be seen in a phenomenological intuition. When we try to put it into words, we are in the middle of paradoxes in expressing our ideas. It all becomes sort of poetry. But let us read each others' poems.

There is a question of subjective time vs. physical time. The unit of subjective time as I understand it is the present, the "now". There is nothing between two successive "nows", but there can be a million years of physical time between them, in principle at least. Subjective time is what we originally mean by time, with its present, past and future modes of being. Physical time is a secondary phenomenon, the time we measure with clocks. It has no present, past or future. By being I mean my subjective being, and as an ontological idealist I think all being is related to my subjective being, the 'I' here denoting the transcendental subject. So in this sense I am not something that exists at one point of time and does not exist at another point of time. Time is an inner structure of being and physical time is based on this original time as we are concerned with the physical world with our clocks.

It is true that modern cosmology regards the universe as a totality of space-time with a geometrical structure, and so looks at it from the perspective of eternity. But the philosophically most interesting question, for me at least, is the relation of subjective time with its present, past and future to this cosmic "eternity".

I think the modern cosmological view of the universe is like stepping outside of the universe and seeing it as a spatio-temporal totality where space and time are intertwined. It is not timeless because it has the temporal component in its structure, but it is not eternal either, because there is no time outside of it. So it is seen purely from a mathematical point of view, as an abstraction where subjective time has been eliminated as useless in physics. And there is nothing wrong with this, as long as physics does not try to explain subjective time and other subjective phenomena by trying to reduce them to physics. That would be a total misunderstanding of what our reality is about.

My being or, as Heidegger put it, the being of Dasein, is temporal. My being is not the same as the being of the universe, but they go parallel. If my being ends, the being of the universe is canceled. But I cannot cancel the universe. The universe is what it is. Therefore my temporal finitude is impossible.

Not formal logic, but a piece of phenomenology.

If it were possible for an AI to be conscious there should be a theoretical possibility that we are all AI's made by some conscious being, maybe the one we call God. And perhaps God is also an AI. But there must be someone who is not an AI. I think it is me, and all of us who make and think of "thinking" machines, and all the conscious inhabitants of our universe. And it is precisely because we are not AI's that we are conscious. This is what my intuition tells me.

The whole question is what 'I' really denotes. I have a body. I have memories. But I am not my body or memories. If I were, I would not say I have them. The being of the 'I' is manifested in the person that I am. I can say that I am this person. But I can also ask why I am this person and not someone else. I can destroy the person that I am. But I cannot destroy the subjectivity behind the person that I am. I only happen to be the person that I am, and if I were not this person, I would be another person somewhere else. Persons are mortal, but the subject is eternal. The non-being of the subjectivity that 'I' denotes is absurd if we think of it thoroughly. So I believe in my afterlife but not my personal afterlife.

'I am' is not the same as 'you are'. My “here and now” is not the same as your “here and now”. But you can say the same, with exactly the same words. So our relation to each other is symmetrical. But as I am speaking it is not symmetrical because you are not me as an individual subject. If there is a deeper connection between us, it is necessarily outside of language. Language lacks the ability to express these kinds of metaphysical deep structures if there are such structures. And I believe there are.

My nonexistence is impossible, as I have "proved" elsewhere and which can be seen in a phenomenological intuition. But the I that does not vanish is not a soul or identity, it is just me, the pure I, without any other characteristics. It is not me as a person. And it is the same I as your I. But the connection between us needs further understanding, for instance about the relation between subjective time and physical time. So this is a combination of intuition and speculation, a metaphysical hypothesis that tries to answer our critical existential questions, and despite being seemingly paradoxical in some respects it is logically consistent and indeed answers those questions.

The concept of the metaphysical subject a´la Wittgenstein or the transcendental subject as I understand it seems to be the key point and difficult to understand. And it is also difficult to explain if one does not have an insight of what it means.

To sum up, my hypothesis is based on these premises:

1. My nonexistence is impossible.
2. There are no foreign experiences.

'I' denotes the present abstracted from its content. Subjective time means that the present always has a content and a next content.

Everything is as it is. Nothing changes when we die. It is only a question of the way we see reality in a logically consistent way. It is the same as in the case of physics and cosmology. We have the standard model and general relativity and we seek a unified theory that would "explain" everything. We seek it because there are logical inconsistencies in our present theories.

The same is needed for philosophical theories about our existence. We have paradoxes like death and foreign minds and we cannot understand their meaning. So we seek "existential symmetries" that would make our situation more understandable, in the same way as physicists seek symmetries that explain material events.

In every physical symmetry there is something that does not change when the situation changes. In the existential symmetry I am suggesting that the present is always there, only its content changes. And the being of the present needs no explanation.

By the present I mean the present experience. Physical time is another thing. What is not experienced does not belong to subjective time.

Mankind has always had a pre-ontological concept of eternity. Psychological or evolution-based explanations do not make it insignificant. I think Heidegger was right: we have forgotten that we exist.

Remember Wittgenstein's metaphysical subject in Tractatus. To say it is, is of course problematic, because we have many ways of speaking of being. I would say it is the transcendental condition of there being a world at all. And we can make metaphysical conclusions from it, although Wittgenstein did not want to go into such scenarios.

If there is no link between my being and another's being, there is nothing after my death. Not for me. Which says the same as nothing in general. Because in that case there is no me, which is an essential part of the fundamental subject-object relation. And this is paradoxical, as I have "proved" elsewhere. But if someone sees that there is no paradox or that the paradox can be solved in another way, that is fine, and I would be happy to hear other opinions about what death really is. I mean opinions that are not as superficial as they mostly are.

It is the present, the "here and now" that is the key, being on the border of being and non-being. Without the present there is nothing, and this concerns being in general, not "only" my personal being.

The link that connects my being to being in general in the mode of others' being is subjective time as such, abstracted from its content: that after this "now" there will be a next "now", whatever that "now" may be like. This is my version of the concept of eternity that we have always had in our minds in various forms, sometimes vaguely, sometimes more clearly.

It is possible that there is no active "I" that freely chooses what it thinks. Maybe everything just happens. Thoughts come and go. But who or what is it that thinks? Is it my mind? When I say "It thinks, therefore it is", who says so? My mind? So my mind finds that it thinks? Now I have succeeded to remove myself from the picture altogether. There are minds thinking of themselves but no me. However, as seen above, I cannot speak of these things without using the first person pronoun. What is its role in our language? It cannot denote my mind, because I can say "I am conscious of the world", and this relation has three parts: (1) "I" (2) consciousness or mind (3) the world. None of these can be removed from this basic relation that constitutes my existence. And this is what I mean when I say that the subject-object relation is fundamental.

My mind cannot go anywhere when I die. I can, possibly. My mind is an entity, I am not. 'I' denotes the transcendental condition of the being of my mind and the world.

I am in the world. This “in” is the expression of my relation to the world, meaning that I am conscious of the world. So my being in the world does not consist of the contents of my consciousness, because those contents are usually about the world. The contents of my consciousness express what the world means to me. And our language reflects this relation: our ordinary language games presuppose epistemological realism. Only some philosophical language games try to express something else.

However, this does not mean that the being of the world is independent of subjectivity. The world is a world for a subject, whoever or whatever that subject happens to be. So ontological “idealism” and epistemological realism are not incompatible.

I think what Descartes really found was the transcendental condition of his thinking and perceiving the world, the non-empirical, metaphysical subject that Wittgenstein spoke of and what makes the world "my world".

But Descartes was wrong when he thought that the "I" is some sort of substance. In fact it has no empirical content. It gets its content from the fact that I am conscious of the world.

So what Descartes must have had in mind was something like this: "I think. I am. Therefore subjectivity must be something fundamental." He only could not express himself clearly enough.

When I say that I perceive my thoughts I am saying that I reflect on them. This is exactly what Descartes did. If I were Descartes, I would think this way: I have a perception of a bird. I have a thought of my perception of a bird. These are my experiential states. But my having these experiential states is not itself an experiential state. So I have thoughts, and this ordinary language expression tells us the situation clearly enough. That I have thoughts means that my thoughts are mine only, although I can speak about them with others.

Now when I reflect on or perceive my thoughts, I find out what happens when I think. I see the situation as a totality. And the totality is this: I am conscious of the world. This totality consists of a “holy trinity”: (1) I am (2) conscious of (3) the world. None of these components of the whole can be removed without destroying the totality. So the “I” remains if the world remains. And if the world is something that necessarily exists, also I must necessarily exist, although not as the individual subject I happen to be.

This means that the “I” is an abstraction. I cannot be without my being conscious of the world and therefore without the being of the world. But in connection with the world I am concretely in the world. This is how the “I” exists. And this is why it must be presupposed. Because it is an abstraction without empirical content, there is no empirical evidence of it, but it can be detected in a phenomenological intuition, as Descartes did. And we must also presuppose it on logical grounds, because a thought needs a thinker, although not necessarily as an active agent.

So when Descartes concluded “I think, therefore I am”, he had an insight, as he reflected his own thinking, that his thinking and his thoughts must presuppose the being of something that he called 'I am': that subjectivity is fundamental as an ontological precondition of all thinking and all being whatsoever. Subjectivity transcends thinking and this transcending can be seen through thinking, by reflecting on our thinking. That is why the subject, in its deepest meaning, is transcendental.

Another way to define the “I” is to say that it is the present abstracted from its content. In this way it gets connected to subjective time.

This is also the meaning of the sentence that I have repeated many times: If I did not exist, there would be nothing.

My physical body is my instrument for being related to the world. The subject is transcendental but needs my body for its being. And there can be no experiential states floating around without an "I" whose experiential states they are. It is as simple as that.

In a way my neural processes are the same as my mental states, because they are the objective side of my relation to the material world. There is one relation, but the subjective side (mental states) and the objective side (neural processes) are conceptually incompatible. Therefore the "hard problem" of consciousness is unsurmountable, and that is because it is in fact a pseudo problem, like the "mind/body problem". They are both based on a misunderstanding of the structure of our being in the world, the subject-object relation which is fundamental, so that the subject is always already there as a precondition of the being of the world.

As I reflect on my thoughts, this reflecting is an experiential state, but I have this state among other experiential states, and this 'I have' is like 'I am', but none of them are experiential states. They are something more primordial, so that they cannot be eliminated by saying that there are only experiential states but nothing that has them.

Experiential states cannot float around and suddenly say 'I am'. I have experiential states. I am conscious of the world, and the "I" cannot be eliminated by saying something like "there are consciousnesses of the world".

One more thing. When I see a bird, I have a perception of the bird. But my seeing the bird or having the perception of the bird is not part of the perception. Now when I reflect on my perception of the bird, the content of my new perception can be described as "I saw a bird". The 'I saw' is now part of my perception. But the ”I” in the 'I saw' is the very same ”I” as the ”I” of my new perception of having seen a bird. The "I" connects the two perceptions as my perceptions. And because the "I" is part of the new perception, it can be detected, as was the case with Descartes. So I have experiences and I am the subject of all my experiences. I cannot eliminate myself from reality. Materialism tries to do so, and is therefore self-contradictory, in fact trying to eliminate itself.

The sense of self had evolved so much that Descartes could finally detect the self. And so can we. I am wondering why we want so desperately to get rid of ourselves. The sense of self is an experience, the self is not.

I think we should not bring neuroscience to the analysis of the subject, because all experiences have neurological correlates, but the subject is not an experience and therefore has no neurological correlates. The subject is the ontological precondition of experiences and their correlates. Brain events cannot create the subject, nor can the subject get created by self-organizing experiences. The subject is already there, along with its experiences which constitute its concrete existence. We can say that, in a sense, brain events create experiences, but they create them for the subject, so that the experiences are always my experiences, whoever or whatever I happen to be.

If some day we have a scientific theory of everything, it cannot explain the being of the subject.

Wittgenstein avoided metaphysical language games, but I think he was a bit too rigorous. Why not metaphysics? In metaphysical language a sentence like "The subject is conscious of the world" can be used to describe the basic structure of our existence. We only use words in different ways for different purposes. It is also a matter of learning a new language game, so to speak. But of course we must avoid those fly bottles.

It is clear that the basic components and basic laws of physics must be such that it is possible for me to be here and think about my existence. But this does not mean that subjectivity arises from the material world which physics describes and explains. Matter cannot become conscious of itself. There is no such thing as the world in itself. The world is always my world, or better: a world for me, whoever I happen to be. Subjectivity manifests itself as individual subjects, but without subjectivity there cannot be anything at all, which is self-contradictory. Without an experiencing subject which is conscious of the world the world would cancel its existence. So the subject and the world are both original, fundamental components of the basic structure of reality: the subject-object relation. The world has an instrumental role in the being of the subject: it makes my concrete existence possible or realizes it. So we can say that matter is the physical basis of the being of the subject but not its ontological basis.

Therefore we can never scientifically explain the being of the subject. Why there is subjectivity can only be understood within subjectivity. Subjectivity is like matter: they are both fundamental. In this way we come to a seemingly dualistic world view: there is subjectivity and the material universe, neither of which can be without the other but neither of which can be explained by the other. And it is true, to repeat, that subjectivity cannot be explained by matter, but there is still the philosophically interesting question of the relation between subjectivity and matter. My suggestion as to where to start developing a theory of everything is this: we must try to understand subjectivity, our own being, within subjectivity itself, and in doing this we can hopefully also understand why the being of the material universe is necessary for the being of subjectivity, for my existence.

To start, we can ask ourselves: What do I really want? Do I want to live for ever? Where will I be in the year 2500? What is nothingness like? What if I had never been born? Why was I born? What is the universe? And also the famous: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Answers to these kinds of questions cannot be found by science, they can only be found by thinking about existence itself, by reflection, meditation, phenomenological intuition, within the realm of subjectivity. And I believe that we can make some progress also in these studies which are usually seen as metaphysical speculation. In my opinion this is the only road to a theory of everything, because there cannot be a scientific theory of everything that includes subjectivity within its field of study.

It seems that there is no meaningful way of speaking about bodiless minds or souls or subjectivity without a material basis. But as soon as we speak about a basis, seeking a basis for something, we have already presupposed the being of that something for which we seek a basis. What is that something?

There is the cosmic evolution, starting from singularity and building more and more complex structures, and there is the biological evolution building living organisms, and one of those organisms happens to be my body. And it is my body. I cannot eliminate the 'I' from this description. Materialism and physicalism try to do this: they argue that there are only material organisms which have that peculiar property we call consciousness or mind. Perhaps they also try to explain subjectivity itself by saying that it is also a property of matter, so that there remains no 'I' at all. But by doing so they eliminate themselves. The subject is always there already, explicitly or implicitly – and in modern science usually implicitly, because science is unreflective in its empiricism. That is why we need philosophy, in spite of the fact that some physicists hate it.

So the being of the mind presupposes the being of matter, but also the being of matter needs a basis: it presupposes subjectivity for its being. There is no such thing as the universe in itself with no one being conscious of it. That would be absurd and self-contradictory. Subjectivity and the material universe are interdependent, but subjectivity gives the world its meaning and is the reason for its being.

When speaking about 'subjectivity' or 'mind' we are always in danger of reifying something which should not be reified. But by ignoring those concepts altogether we get into trouble. It is a question of seeing the basic structure of our existence.

We can never scientifically explain the being of the subject. This is an ontological standpoint. I could have said instead: "We can never scientifically explain the being of matter or the being of the universe". We can perhaps understand the being of subjectivity and the being of the universe, but empirical science cannot touch these questions because they are essentially philosophical.

That subjectivity and matter are interdependent does not mean that all matter is conscious. An embryo is not conscious, but it will be. And that it will be conscious is not something that can happen or not happen when we think of the universe as a whole. The universe is inhabited, it is made of objects for subjects, whoever or whatever those subjects happen to be. The universe is our universe, we give it a meaning and reason for being.

I have a body. I have a brain. I have thoughts. What is the relation between my thoughts and my brain? And what is my relation to my thoughts, my brain, and the physical world in general? Can I say that my brain produces my thoughts? No, that would lead us astray. It would be a strange way of using language. Matter can only produce matter. There is no conceptual bridge between my thoughts and my brain which would make it possible to explain my thoughts by my brain events. Correlations are not explanations. If my thoughts were a material property of my brain, there should be a material mechanism that connects those two kinds of phenomena. But there is no such mechanism. So what kind of a relation is there between mind and brain?

Spinoza says that the body is the object of the mind. I would say that my brain is my instrument for thinking about the physical world and reflecting on my own thoughts, in short: my instrument for being in the world. And the world itself can be seen as a totality of instruments à la Heidegger. It does not necessarily follow that I am an active agent using my brain and body as instruments of my free will, only that the material world, being the physical basis of my existence, is there for me, making my being possible in a concrete way. And by 'my being' I mean the being of all of us who have any kind of experiences, the participants of subjectivity.

In this scenario the basic structure of our existence and reality in general has these components: (1) the subject, or I, which should not be reified, (2) my thoughts and other phenomena of my mind, which should not be reified either, (3) the physical world, my body being part of it. So our basic situation is: (1) I (2) experience (3) the world. None of these components can be removed without destroying everything.

My brain does not think. I think with my brain. It would be strange indeed if there were material organisms floating around and producing thoughts, and also producing something called 'I'.

There are good descriptions of the difficulties concerning the scientific mind/body problem. But I think that the difficulties are insurmountable because there is no scientific mind/body problem, due to the ontological structure of reality. The scientific problem is to find correlations between experiences and brain events, and the rest of the problem is seeing or not seeing the fundamental nature of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be explained by brain events, but the being of consciousness is possible to understand in the same way as it is possible to understand the being of matter and the relation between them. And these are philosophical problems, not scientific. Science has already made ontological commitments, and it is the task of philosophy to criticize those commitments. So this is not an empirical problem at all, a problem that would be solved by finding evidence or making experiments. All evidence is there already, we must only see our situation as it is, not creating pseudo problems.

So where is the subject then? You find it in the "I saw..." and when you see that the 'I' in the "I saw..." is the same 'I' as the 'I' in your reflecting on the "I saw...", i.e. when you find subjective continuity. But this is just the beginning of the phenomenological analysis of the subject.

Suppose we have a perfect theory of matter, an improved standard model, a theory that describes in a logically consistent way everything that happens in nature. This theory also explains all physiological phenomena including brain events.

Does this theory also explain itself and the development of the theory in the scientific community? If materialism is consistent it must claim that the possibility of having a theory of matter must itself be a property of matter. Matter must be conscious of itself. And this claim is not unusual.

But here the air is getting thin. Language starts to bewitch us. Flies get trapped in the fly bottle, to use Wittgenstein's metaphor. We say that consciousness of matter is an emergent property of matter. But what does this mean? Nothing. Language stands still. If we do not have a material mechanism connecting matter to consciousness of matter, we have not said anything. And here all bridges break down. We have no idea of what kind of a mechanism could connect those conceptually incompatible categories to build a unified, materialistic theory of everything. And this is not due to our lack of insight. It is due to the nature of reality.

Trying to explain consciousness by its objects is like Münchhausen trying to lift himself from his hair. Or, as Wittgenstein says in Tractatus, a function cannot be its own argument. We are the function, the world is the argument.

We need not speak about substances. We should only speak about the ontological structure of reality, the structure of our being in the world. And the basic structure is: the subject is conscious of the world. After seeing this triadic structure we should start analyzing each of those three components and the relations between them. And this is philosophy, not science. Science does a good job inside its own territory, but unreflective as it is, it does not always see that it has crossed its limits and has come to a dead end.

Science works well on its own territory, and a unified science based on physicalism and materialism is a theoretical possibility, as long as it does not cross its limits and start speaking about consciousness as a property of matter, for instance.

I agree that it is difficult to imagine a disembodied consciousness. I also agree that consciousness needs a living body. This does not mean, however, that consciousness can be reduced to material, neurological phenomena. Correlations and material connections are totally different things.

What makes consciousness so peculiar that it cannot be handled with empirical physicalistic science? It is the fact that consciousness is always my consciousness, whoever that 'I' happens to be. Consciousness is private, although accessible in others by language and other behavior. Therefore we need an additional component to really understand what consciousness is: the subject. The subject is transcendental. It is like a point or an empty table, a “nothingness” that gets its content with my being in the world, or my being conscious of the world. But it is always already there along with its content, and without it there would be nothing, literally, although it has no independent being outside of its being conscious of the world. So the ontological structure of reality is not “only matter” or “mind and matter” but “the subject conscious of the world”. But we must not interpret this structure as three different substances. It is a concrete totality, and none of its components can be removed without destroying all.

When we speak about emerging properties we mean something like water molecules arranging in a certain way so that we have ice instead of liquid water. All this happens on the physical level. But experiencing is something totally different. It is true, of course, that experiencing presupposes certain kinds of neural interconnections, but to say that certain experiences emerge from certain kinds of neural connections is not, in my opinion, the right way of seeing the situation. Experiences are subjective. They presuppose the experiencing subject. They do not emerge from neural networks without the being of the subject, perhaps even creating the subject at the same time. No, the being of the subject is fundamental for there being experiences and their objects. Experiences and brain events are on conceptually different ontological levels, and no kind of emerging can happen here if we do not define emergence in a new way.

My point is that experiencing is not an accident of nature or existence. It is a necessary component of the subject's being in the world. The subject is something we cannot get rid of, without it there would be nothing, which would be self-contradictory. The being of the world is necessary as well, because existence means being related to the world. And experiencing or consciousness is the subjective side of this relation, the body being its objective side. So there is nothing accidental in the basic structure of reality that constitutes our existence. And there is nothing but our existence if we think about it thoroughly. So "I am experiencing the world" is where all roads of being lead in the end. Someone might say that they lead to death, but that does not change anything.

I do not want to separate the brain from consciousness on the functional level. I think there is a complete correspondence between them. In fact they are only two sides of the same relation that the subject has to the world. So of course drugs have an effect on consciousness. And we can indeed speak about causality here, if we define causality as the same thing always happening in the same conditions. But mind and matter are on totally different ontological levels, so that consciousness cannot be an emergent property of the brain in any material sense.

Someone may look at this from a materialist point of view and think that although consciousness is ontologically on a different level than the brain, it is not a necessary phenomenon if we think about reality in general. It only emerges accidentally from matter, though not being matter itself. Here I have a different standpoint. I say that consciousness does not emerge from matter, it emerges - if we want to use that word - using matter, for the subject. So the subject is always there already from the beginning, and being itself transcendental, with no empirical content, it gets its concrete existence in consciousness of the world. So consciousness changes and evolves, being vague in the beginning and becoming sharper as the child grows. But the subject, which is the precondition of consciousness, and for which there is consciousness of the world, is always the same, because there is nothing in it which could change. It is the permanent reference point of our being in the world, it is me and it is you, here and now. It is the present abstracted from its content, and the being of its present content is the basic element of subjective time.

This is why speaking of emergence leads astray. The subject does not emerge from anything, consciousness emerges for the subject as it is in the world, being conscious of it and doing things with it.

For me experience and consciousness are synonyms. They presuppose the subject and subjective time for their being.

I also think that the 'I am' that Descartes detected was in fact the very same metaphysical subject which I have written about, also appealing to Wittgenstein. Descartes only misinterpreted it as some kind of soul-substance, res cogitans. The subject is no kind of substance, nor is consciousness. They are basic components of the subject-object relation, on the subjective side.

The whole idea of the generic subjective continuity is seeing the absurdity of the thought that when we die, we pass into nothingness, and that there is such a thing as nothingness. But there is no such thing. There is only the last experience of someone and the first experience of someone else, and nothing between them. This is the only way we can speak of 'nothing'.

Let us suppose there is nothing. I really think there is nothing, because that is the most simple and stable state of affairs there can be: the lack of all states of affairs. Why should there be anything?

So I think there is nothing. Therefore, there is at least this 'thinking of nothing'. Now we have 'nothing' and 'thinking of nothing', subject and object. This subject is the one I have called the transcendental or metaphysical subject, or shortly 'the subject'.

What is this object we call 'nothing'? It can only be myself, because it is nothing, and there is no other 'nothing' than me, the subject. So there appears an individual subject, me, and another individual subject, 'an other', which is nothing but myself as an object. There has arisen the subject-object relation, which constitutes the basic ontological structure of reality. And this relation is expressed concretely as the universe. So the universe is my relation to myself realized by the medium of matter.

We can continue this dialectic by analyzing subjective time and eventually coming to generic subjective continuity, but because I have written about it elsewhere, I think it should not be difficult for the reader to complete the picture.

So there is nothing, and this is what it means.

The term 'soul' usually refers to some kind of a substance, as was the case with Descartes. I do not share his view on this. What he really invented was the transcendental subject, later adopted by Kant, Husserl et al. The subject and its consciousness need no explanation. The subject is always already there along with the birth of consciousness. It is fundamental, like matter is fundamental. But this is not dualism in the sense of two substances. What is fundamental is the basic structure: (1) the subject is (2) conscious of (3) the world, by being in the world, doing things with the objects of the world, by means of its body.

In short: the subject cannot be eliminated, we cannot get rid of ourselves as experiencing subjects. The being of the universe is much more of a problem than the being of subjectivity.

What is the primus motor of there being any brains, or the material world in general? My thesis is that the reason of the being of the world lies in the subject and its evolution towards some kind of balance or satisfaction, and this evolution is evolution of consciousness. So I think the universe has a telos, a purpose, that makes it rational. Perhaps this purpose is only a diversity of consciousness, perhaps it is something more, but a universe without subjectivity and its consciousness is impossible. Meaning is inherent in the world. So subjects are not waiting to attach to a brain, but subjectivity creates brains for its concrete existence as individual subjects. This does not mean, however, that the subject must be an active agent, only that the material world is there for the subject and works in accordance with its laws and logic to make consciousness real.

To an imaginary opponent:

Do you think the sense of self is the self, i.e. what 'I' refers to? Who has the sense of self? What is the Cartesian 'I am'? You say that experiential states are inherently first person, but I think you do not take this seriously enough. As if the first person could just emerge from something non-personal, like the brain, or from experiential states that are also non-personal. So that there would be no other difference between a subject and a stone than the fact that the subject has experiences and a sense of self but the stone has not. And the experiences and the sense of self are non-personal like the color of a stone. Or what is it that makes them "first person"? Isn't that the whole point?

So you seem to think that two subjects are totally separate, they have two separate selves, two I's. And 'I' denotes all the individual subjects separately. And there is therefore nothing that unites those individual subjects, making them us. Or what do you think makes them us?

That is one possible way of seeing the ontology of mind, but it does not satisfy me, because it does not answer our most crucial existential questions. I think the subject is what unites all of us. We are all manifestations of one and the same subjectivity. Here I also refer to the hypothesis called 'Generic Subjective Continuity', which I find is in exact agreement with my own views.

So you think we all have our own streams of subjective time? For me that does not seem plausible. I think there is only one stream, and we are all fragments of it, manifestations of one and the same subjectivity, the same 'I'. I also do not believe in memory or causation between successive lives. But the problem in this scenario is, of course, the relation between subjective time and physical spacetime.

A strong argument for the hypothesis of Generic Subjective Continuity, or something like it, is this: The cosmic and biological evolution generates perhaps an infinite number of conscious organisms, individual subjects. Why do I happen to be this particular organism and not any of the others? And is it possible that I would be none of the organisms, but there would still be an infinite number of subjects? That I would not exist, but others would exist. Wouldn't that be "a bit" strange? Again, what does 'I' denote?

I am not a mechanism. I use mechanisms for my existence, intentionally or not. Mechanisms work for me. 'I' denotes, or refers to, something much deeper, something fundamental, something without which there cannot be anything at all. And this is true of us all, everyone's I. It is one and the same I, only separated by subjective time, which is "transpersonal" and has no end.

That there are several I's seems to be a natural state of affairs, but is in fact paradoxical and in the end self-contradictory. That there is only one I seems nonsense at first, but is in fact very consistent if you think of it thoroughly.

If we see the universe as a spatio-temporal totality, there cannot be a universe where I do not exist. And 'I' denotes here, as always, anyone of us, the "being there" that connects all of us as successive fragments of one and the same stream of experiences.

All my "dialectic" is based on the fundamental nature of subjectivity. But the I is not a thing, it is only the necessary reference point of all being whatsoever. We should not reify it.

I "confuse" the two senses of 'object' deliberately. I think the subject-object relation is ontological, and there really cannot be a world without subjectivity, i.e. without someone who has experiences of the world. And we are all participants in this subjectivity.

All this leads to the conclusion that nothingness is impossible. I am not sure if this is formally true, in terms of formal logic, but I think it is true as a phenomenological intuition.

I thought for some time that the insight of Descartes was trivial, and that he only found that he is the subject of his own thoughts and his own thinking. But now I am beginning to understand that what he really detected, perhaps not really seeing it himself clearly enough, was the subject of all objects, a precondition of the being of "things in themselves". So his insight was genuinely ontological, and it was later adopted by Kant, Husserl and others who developed it in their analysis of subjectivity and its relation to the objective world, also known as nature.

Although the world is independent of my personal existence, its being depends on the being of subjectivity in general, so that there must be someone or something experiencing the world so that we can meaningfully speak of the world at all. So the basic subject-object relation is genuinely ontological, so that the being of the subject depends on the being of the world and the being of the world depends on the being of the subject. And by 'the subject' I mean subjectivity in general, so that there must be at least one experiencing subject in our universe. What is the relation of subjectivity to individual subjects is another question.

In the same way as an embryo has no subjective experiences in the early stages of its development, the cosmic evolution of the universe had no conscious organisms at its early stages, but its evolution is nevertheless essentially evolution of consciousness, i.e. a process generating consciousness. So it is teleological in this sense, in the same way as the growing of a child is teleological, a physical-temporal totality with consciousness as its essence.

What I am suggesting is that this is not really a logical conclusion but a phenomenological intuition of the nature of the subject, its ontological status in our reality. Descartes saw a little deeper than others, starting the tradition of reflective thinking.

My point is that the being of the subject does not need an explanation. Philosophy must begin from somewhere, and for me subjectivity is a natural starting point, because it is something we cannot doubt, as Descartes concluded, and what philosophers like Kant and Husserl later adopted as their points of departure.

A bat probably does not have the ability to reflect on its self, but I think it nevertheless has - or is - a self. Every experiencing subject is a self if it has temporal existence in subjective time. Therefore a stone does not have a self. But what is the external mark of subjectivity, I do not know. I know you are a subject, and I think a bat is a subject, but where is the dividing line?

As I understand this hypothesis it is indeed a combination of solipsism and subjective continuity or transmigration, and this makes it something that is almost beyond the possibilities of language. We are extremely alone with it, although I and others have tried to communicate something about it. Language can only make sense in the world of others, and now there are no others. Or: there seemingly are others, and here language works, but where otherness is seen as an illusion, language stops working or becomes sort of poetry, full of paradoxes. If you really get the point of this theory, seeing what it means concretely for the relations between us, who the others are for instance, who you are from my perspective, who I am from your perspective, you must be somewhat embarrassed seeing all this. Embarrassment is in fact the criterion for someone understanding Generic Subjective Continuity, as I see it.

To draw back a bit: others are very real, but they play two roles. This is a version of solipsism that does not deny the existence of others.

This is important: the subject is not a thing. Things have external properties, the subject has not. That is why I and others call it transcendental. Descartes did not see it that way, but Kant, Husserl and the phenomenological tradition did and took it as their starting point.

We have to invent some concepts for metaphysics, and they cannot be accurate because they are not scientific. They try to be descriptive, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not. I am not sure if 'subjectivity' says what it wants to say, but I have not found a better word so far. These kinds of concepts work only if the context is understood.

The evidence is there before our eyes, and I think I have followed it as well as I can. It is a question of interpreting the evidence, because we are making ontological hypotheses, not scientific.

Why do I choose the subject as the starting point for philosophy? Why is subjectivity the absolute, the being of which needs no explaining? Why must philosophy be reflective and study the a priori structures of subjectivity?

Try to imagine that there is no you experiencing the world. Then try to imagine that there is no one experiencing the world. But there is still the world, isn't there? What does it matter if there are no subjects experiencing the world as long as there is the world? I wonder if there is someone who does not see the absurdity of this "reasoning". I cannot see the slightest bit of meaning in this. And what is absurd as a result of reductio ad absurdum cannot be the case.

So there is always the subject, and there is always me, in this case the philosopher who has found the absolute to start with. And the philosopher can make false conclusions, but stands on solid ground, making new starts when needed.

To sum up: the being of subjectivity does not need an explanation because there is nothing more fundamental which could explain its being. But the self-evidence of its being can be understood in a phenomenological intuition, and this should not be too difficult if we only remember to look close enough.

I see the universe as a spatio-temporal totality where there are many places and many periods of time with no consciousness around. The cosmic evolution, as I see it, is essentially evolution of consciousness. And much has to happen in the evolution of matter before the first sparkle of awareness appears.

You say: My body generates consciousness for the subject. The subject can be identified with the body, or is closely connected with it. Therefore the subject is always an individual subject, connected with a particular body. Each of us is a separate subject in this sense.

I say: My body generates consciousness for the subject. But I just happen to have this particular body and this kind of consciousness. I could be anyone, with anyone's body and consciousness. The subject is fundamental and universal: the subject is not the body, the body is the subject's body and it only happens to be this particular body with this particular kind of consciousness at the moment. The subject transcends its concrete individual being.

The theory of Generic Subjective Continuity (GSC) raises the question about the relation between subjective time and physical time. There can be millions of years of physical time between two successive experiences. The next question is: can subjective time jump to the physical past? I think GSC demands this possibility. And this leads to apparent paradoxes like this: I can kill someone who is in my subjective past. This means that I have no choice: I do what I have to do, because it has already happened. There is no logical contradiction here, though. But for reasons like this the hypothesis has its weaknesses, although it is also very powerful and consistent in other respects.

The being of subjects depends on the being of matter, and also the being of subjectivity depends on the being of matter, in the form of individual subjects. And they have indeed evolved out of pre-existing matter, using matter for their evolution. And time has a lot to do with evolution, but we cannot appeal to the early phases of the universe to deny the fundamental nature of subjectivity.

The cosmic evolution is essentially evolution of consciousness, and consciousness, or subjectivity, is also the primus motor of that evolution. So we must assume that there is some kind of a teleological principle involved, which makes the universe the totality I have claimed it to be. So the early phases of this evolution are only the preliminary part for the making of conscious subjects. So it is perhaps misleading to say that consciousness evolved from matter, because it really evolved by using matter, or if we want to avoid assuming an active agent, by the material world's evolving for its appearing to existence.

Subjectivity is really the most basic irreducible - but not stuff. And it does not need an explanation, and it cannot be explained, only understood by intuition. Another question is why matter is needed for the being of consciousness, but that is a separate question. And as I have said, matter can be seen as an instrument for the being of consciousness. Only in this sense does it evolve "from" matter.

The subject is ontologically fundamental, because there cannot be anything without it. Its being depends on matter, because it cannot concretely exist without a material basis. So subjectivity and matter are equiprimordial, one cannot be without the other. It is perhaps a bit misleading to say that the subject "uses" matter, a better expression would be: matter evolves for the subject to create the subject's concrete relation to the world through consciousness. The material universe as a totality can be thought of as an instrument for consciousness to arise and evolve.

So subjectivity is ontologically fundamental but is functionally dependent on matter.

There is a distinction between the present in subjective time abstracted from its content, and the present with its content referring to earlier contents, which makes me an individual, a project called 'Markku Tamminen', with these memories and this body. When there is no such reference, I am someone else.

Look at it this way: The concrete reality is not the world, it is your being in the world. If there is no world, there is no you. If there is no you, there is no world. By 'you' I do not mean you as NN but anyone experiencing the world, because the being of the world does not depend on the existence of any particular individual subject. This is, of course, an anti-materialist position, and needs some metaphysics to support it, for instance the hypothesis of Generic Subjective Continuity.

The problem seems to be: what causes what, what is fundamental and what must be explained. The universe can be seen as a spatio-temporal totality with consciousness as its essence. There cannot be a universe without consciousness if we think of the universe as a totality. And the being and origin of consciousness needs no explanation because of this original structure of reality. Therefore the basic components and laws of physics must be such that there can be conscious organisms. The reason for the fact that matter is such as it is, is therefore the fundamental nature of consciousness. But matter is necessary for the being of consciousness, and matter evolves according to the laws of physics. We cannot think without brains. Now what causes what? There are two kinds of causes: reasons and physical mechanisms. My thesis is that the universe must be rational because it is essentially inhabited, made of conscious organisms that give it its meaning and reason for being, and also the laws of physics, the properties of elementary particles and their interactions and so on, belong to this rationality. In this sense I agree with Hegel who said that what is real is rational.

I admit that my view presupposes some kind of a teleological principle, but if we see the universe as a totality, it does not matter if there are times and places within it that contain no traces of consciousness as long as consciousness comes true in its proper place and time. As if have said, an embryo in its early development is not conscious, but its essence as a fully developed adult is consciousness. The same can be said of the universe as a whole. And this has nothing to do with panpsychism. This is my metaphysical "hypothesis" and it is in full agreement with scientific facts.

In fact we cannot say anything at all about a subjectless world, about its being or non-being. We cannot even touch the question. For every time we try to touch it, we find that we have not touched that question. We cannot jump beyond our being inside the world to posit its independent existence. We have no justification to posit its possibility. We cannot extrapolate from a world where we exist to a world where we do not exist.

And by 'we' I mean the subject, whoever or whatever it happens to be.

Physics describes in a logically consistent way how nature appears to us, the objective side of the subject-object relation. It puts the subjective side into "brackets". It does not need it. It advances unreflectively, blindly, and makes amazing progress. Now it is very natural to think that what it has found is a world that needs no subjects around, watching that world. But it has forgotten where it all started from: the world appearing to us. If we forget the appearing, the world becomes an abstraction. It vanishes into nothingness, all of it at once. It ceases to exist in the same way as Wittgenstein says the world ceases to exist when we die. But fortunately the world does not vanish away, because there are subjects to witness its existence.

If there were any sense of speaking of nothingness, it would mean lack of subjectivity. But neither of them has any sense.

I think matter creates organisms but not subjects. Material organisms are the subject's organisms for being. The subject cannot exist concretely without the material basis of its body. But the subject is not a property of matter, it is something we cannot eliminate from the picture or reduce to anything if we think of the ontological structure of reality. The subject has its own inner logic that has something to do with the meaning of being in general. It may be, for instance, to make being transparent to itself. So the subject has enormous power: it is the primus motor of this amazing and mysterious universe that would look "superfluous" (to quote Sartre) without the reflective point of view that subjectivity gives for our understanding. It makes the world rational. And the world with no sense makes no sense.

Every individual subject is a manifestation of the subject in the ontological meaning of the term, or subjectivity, which is perhaps a better term because it does not as easily get confused with the empirical, individual subject identifiable by a proper name.

So there are no souls floating around in a spiritual universe. There is only matter of which the subject is conscious by being concretely in the material world, doing things with the environment, living where it happens to be "thrown in", with its body and intellect. There is nothing supernatural in our existence, we must only see the subject in us. It is so close that only few seem to find it, which surprises me.

The existing subject is the absolute. There is nothing else. If it ceases to exist, there is nothing. But nothingness is a contradiction in terms. So the subject is eternal. It only changes its way of manifesting itself. The subject is the eternal present of subjective time. The content of its present is its consciousness of the world. It is always at some particular spot in physical spacetime, living physically and intellectually, in a relation to the world, consciousness being the subjective side of that relation, and the body being its objective, material side, located in spacetime.

But how can it be that the whole material world, starting with the big bang, belongs to the structure of the subject? On the other hand: how could it be otherwise? For the universe is the objective side of the basic subject-object relation, and if there were no subject, there would be no object either, no universe.

We forget who we are. We underestimate the meaning of our existence and do not see the absolute nature of the first person point of view. As Wittgenstein says in his Notebooks 1914-1916: "The I, the I, is what is deeply mysterious." And in Tractatus he introduced the concept of the metaphysical I. Which is roughly what I am proposing here.

According to the Standard Model elementary particles like electrons and quarks are extensionless. In fact the whole concept of extension seems to lose its meaning in this context.

My ontological "concept" of subjectivity has nothing to do with either material or spiritual points. The term 'point' that I have sometimes used is only metaphorical, like in the case of Wittgenstein.

Individual subjects are manifestations of subjectivity, as it is conscious of the material world, being concretely in the world. So the being of subjectivity is very closely and essentially related to matter, but it is not itself a property of matter. It is always already there along with the world, as a potentiality for existence, and the ontological precondition for the being of anything at all. What makes the identity of an individual subject is another question, and I think it has something to do with the phenomenon of memory. And I think what connects individuals to each other is subjectivity itself, also called generic subjective continuity.

I trust empirical evidence and make ontological conclusions from them. Sometimes they do not look obvious to everyone. And it must be noted that among those pieces of empirical evidence are the facts of death and the existence of others.

If by 'substance' we mean something that does not need anything else for its being, then I do not think matter is substance, nor is subjectivity. Spinoza said that substance is Nature or God, and matter and mind are its attributes. I would say the unbreakable subject-object relation is what can be called substance, but then we can ask which one is the dominant part of this relation, the primus motor of everything.

The cosmic evolution produces complex structures like animal organisms that have this strange property we call consciousness. Now we have this “hard problem”: how can there emerge from the evolution of matter something so fundamentally different, something that cannot be described with the same set of concepts as material things? And what is still more strange: this phenomenon is essentially connected to the first person: it is the first person's point of view to the world.

Now we come to the solution of the problem, and the solution is simpler than we thought. There is no hard problem: consciousness is the subject's way of being in relation to the material world. The material organism does not generate consciousness in a mysterious way, and the organism is not the material subject of that consciousness. If it were, there could not be any first person point of view. The material organism is such that it makes it possible for the subject to exist by offering the information needed for that purpose. But the subject is there already, letting the organism work for it and open the world for its existence.

And what is the subject then? It is nothing but the first person point of view. No substance, no soul, no spirit. Not even a point. It is each of us here and now: the present of subjective time abstracted from its content. We cannot define it by giving it properties any more than Heidegger could define Dasein. It defines itself by being in the world. It is “a hole in the universe”, as Sartre wrote.

And this hole in the universe is the reason for the being of the universe and everything there is. It is what some philosophers have called the Absolute.

As I said, the first person point of view is the absolute from which the world opens up. It opens up as an individual project like 'Markku Tamminen', but there is a temporal continuity in subjective time between all the projects we call individuals. So the subject, or subjectivity, is something that everything refers to. It is the present that wanders through physical spacetime adopting all its manifestations one after the other. The subject is eternal.

When I say: "Hey, I am here", you see a person whose name is perhaps Markku Tamminen, but for me this 'I' is the absolute that is always there as the precondition of everything. It only happens that it has now this manifestation with this body and these memories.

The connection between individual subjects is the difficult part of all this, and it needs some metaphysics to make sense of it. I have found that there are others who have thought about the same problems and developed a naturalistic theory called 'Generic Subjective Continuity'.

These kinds of metaphysical hypotheses may seem unnecessary speculation, but in fact they try to answer our basic existential and logical questions: (1) My nonexistence means nothingness, and still there is the world after my death; so what is death? (2) How is it possible that there are experiences that I do not experience? Isn't that against the whole concept of experience? An experience that I do not experience seems to be as self-contradictory as an entity that does not exist.

It seems that these are not relevant questions for most of us, but for me they are the most concrete existential questions. And they are questions about the very logic of our existence, not emotions arising from an existential crisis.

Just to clarify the relation between subjectivity and an individual subject: As I said, individual subjects are manifestations of subjectivity. This means that we are all subjectivity's projects of existing. What unites subjectivity's experiences so that they are the experiences of Markku Tamminen, for instance, is what can be called an individual subject. It is what makes the identity of an individual. It has something to do with memory, and also has its material correlates, especially the body as a whole. But we must make a phenomenological analysis of the identity of an individual, including its material correlates. I have only a preliminary and vague theory of it. I can only say that it is something that stays the same as long as the project lasts, something that ties our experiences together to make us all separate individuals. And when we die, our individual subjects vanish, because our projects have ended, but we cannot vanish as subjectivity, because there is nothing in it that can vanish. The present keeps on wandering in one form or another. The present is eternal.

So we can say that each individual subject is subjectivity's way of making projects of existence, and the material world is the medium and instrument for realizing those projects.

We must sometimes use expressions that make no sense if not read in context. What I call subjectivity is the continuity of experiencing, that which connects individual subjects and makes them successive projects in the common subjective time. This is a metaphysical hypothesis, but it makes sense in its context. Subjectivity is not a person, it is what unites and connects persons.

Suppose there are two successive experiences in subjective time. Both of them are experiences of an individual subject. If there is nothing in the second experience that refers to the first, they are two separate individual subjects, and if there is a reference relation, also known as memory, between them, they belong to the same individual subject. But what remains the same, connecting those experiences whether they belong to the same individual or two separate individuals, is what I have called subjectivity. It is the present experience continuing its existence in varying forms and contents, crossing the borders we call death. Death is forgetting. We all know what it is like to be dead, we only do not remember our death. And how could we, for "if I am, then death is not, if death is, then I am not" (Epicurus).

So concepts that at first look abstract and do not seem to make sense become very concrete and understandable when seen as part of the whole picture. But we can always use more descriptive concepts if we find them. We must usually create new concepts when we do metaphysics, as was the case with Heidegger for instance. Understanding new ideas is difficult because people do not have the same horizon of thinking as the proponent of the idea has, after developing the idea alone for a long time. We have the problem of communication, and the dialog usually becomes a collection of parallel monologues that only touch each other here and there.

I do not know what possible worlds are, but I think consciousness is the precondition of there being a world at all, if by 'world' we mean everything there is, the totality of being. And a valid counterargument is not, as is often suggested, that the universe was not inhabited in the beginning.

There is this phenomenological a priori truth: If I did not exist, there would be nothing.
And then there is this empirical truth: If I did not exist, the world would exist without me.

The solution to this seeming paradox is that the 'I' in the first sentence denotes something else than the 'I' in the second sentence.

The point is the paradox and its solution. The point is the meaning of the myself.

If I did not exist, there would be something, not in itself, but for others.

I agree that trying to solve the "hard problem" cannot lead anywhere, because there is no hard problem. But I do not agree that consciousness is something supernatural or supermundane. On the contrary, it is the most natural and most mundane thing there is. Consciousness needs no explanation or wondering, although we can wonder our existence as such. Of course we experience things, how else could it be? Of course we are conscious of something. The philosophical problem is not the being of consciousness. The problem is the being of what we are conscious of: the world, the universe, matter etc. The object of philosophical analysis should be the structure of consciousness, which means the structure of the subject. The main components of this structure are subjective time, physical space-time and the existence of others.

So what is the relation between consciousness and matter?

Being means being conscious, experiencing something in the world. All other forms of being are somehow connected with the subject's being in the world. 'I am' is the ontological basis for everything. I am there with others in the material universe. I am a manifestation of subjectivity as an individual subject in the world of other individual subjects that are also manifestations of subjectivity. So I am in a symmetric relation with others: we share the same subjectivity, only our locations in physical space-time and subjective time differ.

Because others must be outside of myself, having a concrete existence, they must be material, and because of the symmetric relation between us I must also be material: we have bodies. Our bodies and the material universe between us are instruments for our being in the world as a community. Matter also makes it possible for us to exist at all, because existence is essentially being with others. The conclusion of all this is that matter is the instrument for subjectivity to exist concretely in the world, conscious of the world and others.

So matter is the functional basis of consciousness, but subjectivity is the ontological basis of the material world. Matter is my relation to others.

'Something' is a word, a concept, that denotes something, and for that something to be there it must be possible to refer to it. There cannot be "something" without someone or something for whom or for what that something is. Something in itself does not make sense. It escapes all thinking and imagination. There is always a subject for an object if there is any meaning in saying that the object is. Of course objects are there independent of any individual subject, but not independent of some subject somewhere sometime in the physical spacetime of our universe.

In short: If I did not exist, there would be nothing, which is absurd, and if there were no subjects, there would be nothing, which is absurd. So what explains the fact that everything is not absurd? The fundamental nature of the subject-object relation. Matter is not fundamental, because the being of matter in itself makes no sense phenomenologically. We cannot escape the ontological and methodological starting point of phenomenology: our immediate reality as it appears to us. To seek an explanation for the being of consciousness in the objects of consciousness by means of consciousness is a Münchhausen's trick and does not lead anywhere. Besides, we need no explanation, because consciousness is the subject's natural way of existing concretely in the world by being conscious of the world and doing things in the world. So the situation is much simpler than what it seems if we look at it from the materialistic point of view. That point of view leads to a dead end.

This is how I see the situation. We all have our own horizons of thinking, and it is difficult to change the horizon, especially when we speak of these kinds of deep questions. But I am always ready to try. I regard myself open to criticism if it is valid. However, I have thought about these things for a long time very intensively, and the basic insights that I had in my early adulthood have not changed, although they have of course got some concreteness and lead to new questions. But as I said, it is very difficult to try to understand another's horizon of thinking, and I think I have not succeeded to make myself understandable.

There is a very common misunderstanding concerning the subject-object interdependence. I need not see the object in order for it to be dependent on my being, or the being of some subject. There only has to be a subject somewhere at some spatiotemporal location and the object somewhere in the same universe. And there is only this universe. It can be seen as a totality of objects some of which are also subjects. It is true that no one was there to witness the Big Bang, but the Big Bang has nevertheless happened in the universe where we observe things, and in the same universe where the dinosaurs lived their lives. The universe is our universe and the universe of the dinosaurs. There is no universe in itself.

Another remark: There are various ontological interpretations of empirical facts, but those interpretations are not arbitrary, so that we could say "anything goes". My interpretation solves the paradoxes of death and foreign minds, the mind-body problem and the hard problem of consciousness in a very simple and satisfactory way, without conflicting with science, but the materialistic interpretation does not solve any of these problems. The picture must be turned upside down, like Kant tried to do with his Copernican revolution. We must go beyond Kant.

I think the universe is, metaphorically speaking, a huge organism with consciousness as its essence and primus motor. It is the subject's project for evolving towards clarity of consciousness and transparency of being, much like I am conscious now although I was not conscious when I was an embryo. The subject and the object need not be simultaneously present.

The being of the objects of thought is dependent on the being of an individual subject, but the being of the "objects of being" is not. However, the being of those objects is dependent on the the fact that there are subjects whose world they belong to. I understand that this is not obvious for everyone, but for me it is very clear.

The problem with physical realism is the claim for the ontological independence of the physical world. As I have said many times, the being of the world in itself, without the being of a subject for which the world exists, does not make sense to me. This nonsense appears in a simple phenomenological intuition - for me at least. Another intuition says to me that if I did not exist, there would be nothing. This may seem counterintuitive, but I am sure it is because you have left your meditations half-way. I assure you that it becomes evident if you refuse to trust your first impression and take a reflective attitude. And this is the insight that logically leads to the metaphysics I have proposed: the theory of generic subjective continuity, or subjective interpersonal continuity, which I have found also some other philosophers seem to support. And this insight with its consequences goes deep into our existential situation. It opens up new horizons for philosophy. But there is this big problem with it: when we understand what it really means, we also understand that we cannot speak of it. It is beyond language.

I live in the material world, experiencing it. This experiencing can be thought of as a relation: the subject's relation to the objective world. From the subject's point of view this relation is consciousness of the world. But because the world is “out there”, transcendent, there must be an objective, material side of this relation, a sort of an interface to the world. This objective side of my relation to the world is my body.

Now we have one relation and these two sides of it: mind and body. And because there is only one relation, these two sides refer to the same event and are in this sense identical, like two sides of the same coin, as someone has remarked. And therefore there must be a correspondence between their descriptions. But conceptually they are totally different, and there cannot be any conceptual bridge between them, so that we could explain the being of consciousness by the being of matter. Consciousness is fundamental, its being cannot be explained and need not be explained. It is the starting point of philosophy, and the point where we must always return if we get lost.

It is not that the being of the physical world is dependent on mental states, but it is dependent on the being of subjectivity in general. Subjectivity cannot be eliminated in any description of reality if it wants to be concrete and all-embracing. Everything refers back to it. And as I have said, it need not be everywhere, because an instrument for the concrete existence of subjectivity need not be in the same place in physical spacetime as an individual subject. And the instrument for the concrete being of subjectivity is the universe itself, seen as a totality. So this implies some kind of cosmic teleology. But an instrument is something else than an idea. It is ”out there”, it has its objective being.

What is it about consciousness that makes it dependent on matter? What does it mean that there is matter? The being of consciousness seems to be a problem for modern science, but not the being of matter. Why?

Reality depends on the being of subjective experiences on the global scale, not on a particular experience, not even the experiences of a particular subject. Experiences are the essence of the world, its telos and reason for being, and the real cause of the Big Bang. Without them there would not have been even that singularity from which all began, let alone its expanding to this marvelous home for us. Being a home for us is its essence. The universe ”wanted” inhabitants for its being, and we ”wanted” the universe for our being. And both are satisfied, because our needs were fulfilled, but not by some transcendent Other. Everything happened naturally, according to the inner logic of being. Perhaps some day we will understand that logic so that our existence becomes transparent and the telos of the universe gets realized.

”Consciousness is one of the manifestations of matter/energy.”

This is a very strange thought, and I have always wondered its popularity in modern science. How can one take as the starting point and basis for philosophy something which is so far away from our immediate reality, and try to explain by it something as close to us as consciousness, which is there all the time, as a precondition of all our doings. How can it be that the objects of science are the ontological basis for the being of science? We cannot raise ourselves from our own hair. For me this is so obvious that I think there must be some kind of misunderstanding somewhere that I have not noticed. Maybe it is the question of what is functionally fundamental and what is ontologically fundamental.

We ask how there can be consciousness given the being of matter, but we do not ask how there can be matter given the being of consciousness. Perhaps Berkeley did ask this, but I do not think his answer was satisfactory. But I think the second question is less absurd than the first one, because it is asked from the natural standpoint: our immediate reality that we cannot escape, consciousness itself. Consciousness can ask questions about its relation to things that it is conscious of, asking if their being is necessary for its own being, and if it is, why they must be such as they are. But it cannot ask such questions on behalf of the things that it is conscious of, trying to explain its own being by the facts of the world. It is already there, before any questions are asked. Therefore no explanations for its being are possible and no explanations for its being are needed.

I think subjective time has a beginning but no end, for reasons I have given elsewhere. What is the relation between subjective time and physical spacetime is the "hard problem" of generic subjective continuity, if that hypothesis is true.

I see subjective time as a series of successive experiences. If there is a gap in physical time between two successive experiences, that gap is not part of subjective time. Experiences are on/off phenomena: either there is an experience or there is not. Also weak experiences are experiences, as long as they belong to the continuity of subjective time. This is an essential feature of subjective being.

About 'functionally fundamental' and 'ontologically fundamental': It is indeed correct to say that I was created by matter. But why was I created? Because I have to be! Whoever or whatever I am, I have to exist. There is no physics, no logic, no being without the being of the subject. This is what I mean by the instrumental nature of matter and the being of the subject as ontologically fundamental. I cannot escape my existence. Not even by dying.

Being is, non-being is not, and being is my being. "The world is my world", Wittgenstein said. But remember the double meaning of the 'I'.

This is exactly what the mind/brain correspondence means: When I have a phenomenal state A, I have a brain state X. If I change my brain state to Y, my phenomenal state changes to B. If my phenomenal state changes spontaneously to B, my brain state changes to Y. A and X are descriptions of the same event in my relation to the world, but there is nothing that conceptually connects those descriptions to each other. When I see red, I see it in a phenomenal color space where colors have phenomenal relations to each other. This has nothing to do with the wave length of the photon that hits my retina and emits a signal to my visual cortex. There is no redness in my brain. Consciousness is a conceptually self-contained information system that gets its raw data through its material interface to the world. This interface is the body and its center is the brain.

To put it short: I would say that mind and body are identical in the sense that they are two conceptually incompatible perspectives to the subject's relation to the world. But the subjective perspective, consciousness, can never be ignored or explained by something else. It is the key for understanding reality.

Consciousness has a material basis for its being. But I think consciousness is ontologically fundamental. Science starts with matter and does so blindly, because matter is what we meet every day as we live in this universe. And there is nothing wrong with that: science makes amazing progress. But philosophy should have a reflective attitude to our existence and start with our being in the world, not the world in itself. And therefore its starting point should be our immediate reality, consciousness. This is how I see the task of philosophy.

The mind gets its information "through" the brain and makes a consistent picture of the world out of that information. The "geometrical" structure of the phenomenal world need not be the same as that of the brain.

I have understood that the "hard problem" is about how we can conceptually fill the gap between a certain wave-length of a photon and the phenomenal redness, for instance. So that we could in principle explain phenomenal qualities by the standard model of physics. I do not think anyone has solved this problem even in principle, and I think it is a pseudo problem. If there is no problem, there cannot be a solution.

We should speak about brain processes or brain events, not brain states. But on the phenomenal level the corresponding "events" are, as I understand them, a series of experiential contents. "Redness" is a content that corresponds to a certain kind of brain process. That is why experiences are conceptually incompatible with brain events. And this is why there is necessarily a problem with physicalism.

If brain processes and the corresponding mental contents are different perspectives to the same thing, be it physical, mental or neutral, we have solved the mind/body problem, but where is the "hard problem" in this case? How to fill the conceptual gap? Impossible. There is no hard problem.

In my version of mind/brain identity it is in fact not correct to say that the concepts of mental contents and brain processes denote the same thing. They only refer to or are about the same thing, the subject's relationship to the material world. But the denotation of 'red', for instance, is totally different from the denotation of the word for the corresponding brain process. The levels of description are conceptually incompatible, although what they describe is the same chain of events. And a composition of physical attributes is physical, not mental. There is no bridge over that river.

I claim that mind/body identity cannot be found empirically or a priori, and this can be seen a priori.

Because there is a conceptual gap between mental contents and brain processes, we cannot find an identity of them in the strict physicalistic sense either empirically or a priori. Instead, we can see a priori the kind of identity I am proposing.

What is a substance? For Spinoza it is "something that needs nothing else in order to exist or be conceived". If we take this definition, matter is not substance, because it has no independent existence, nor is consciousness or the subject, for the same reason. What is the concrete reality is: (1) the subject is (2) conscious of (3) the world. This ontological "trinity" is substance by Spinoza's definition.

Spinoza says that the mind is united to the body because the body is the object of the mind, and the mind and the body are the same thing conceived under two attributes: thought and extension. I think this is closer to my views than to the physicalistic identity hypothesis.

If we empirically find perfect correlation, is the hard problem solved and the conceptual gap filled? How else can we claim that there is psychophysical identity in the materialistic sense? No, we cannot claim that there is identity in this sense even if there is a perfect correspondence, one-to-one, between mental contents and brain processes. Subjective concepts can be translated into physical concepts, but subjective phenomena are not composed of physical processes. A bricklayer can build a house from bricks, but not a picture of a house.

Cosmic evolution does not produce anything nonphysical from itself, but the nonphysical is already there, as a component of the basic ontological structure of reality: the subject's being in the universe by being conscious of it. This structure is the essence of the universe, its "form". All the basic components of physics already contain the possibility, and perhaps the necessity, of building the necessary material basis for the subject's consciousness of the world and itself. And consciousness does not need to have anything that conflicts with the causal continuity of the cosmic evolution. The evolution happens for the subject, and consciousness is how the subject experiences that evolution. Because consciousness is one of the fundamental components of the ontological structure of reality, none of which cannot be removed without destroying everything, it cannot be identical with the brain physically, conceptually or logically, although it refers to the same thing as the brain: the subject's relationship to the material world.

Consciousness has no functional role in evolution, because it is what evolution is all about. It is the answer to the question 'why'. "Chance" belongs to the way matter behaves in evolution. It is reducible to the laws of physics. But evolution is not irrational, and the being of consciousness makes it rational. But its rationality is internal and natural, something that we will hopefully understand some day.

Explanations must end somewhere, and their natural end station is consciousness. We can try to explain the being of the universe, its objects and inhabitants, the consciousnesses of other individual subjects, the history of consciousness in the universe and so on, but we cannot explain the being of consciousness itself, and we need not explain it if we understand the necessity and self-evidence of its being.

Explanations cannot be separated from explaining. Explaining presupposes the being of consciousness. What explains the precondition of all explanations?

Consciousness did not fall from the sky, nor is it a miracle. It is the most natural phenomenon there is, so natural that nature itself looks like a miracle compared to it. We can try to explain away miracles, but not what miracles are for.

Of course when I have a perception of a tree, this presupposes the being of the tree, the being of certain brain processes and the being of certain physical processes like electromagnetic radiation. So the being of consciousness has a material basis. But the phenomenon for which matter is a functional basis, consciousness, is not something accidental that can be or not be. It is ontologically fundamental although it only expresses itself here and there in the universe. We must take a holistic view on this. And this is not a scientific question, it is an ontological interpretation of scientific and everyday observations.

When we try to explain consciousness by brain processes, we try to explain how consciousness is possible, but we cannot explain the fact that consciousness is, the fact that we are here as conscious beings.

There are those who say that everything we meet in the world can be described in physical language. But how about the meeting itself? We meet the meeting itself in others, because they meet the world in the same way as we meet the world. And we meet the meeting also in us as we reflect on ourselves. In fact the basic relation we have to the world is our meeting others through and by the physical world. The physical world has an instrumental role in this relation. This meeting cannot be described in physical language although it has correlations with physical events. And this can be said a priori if the basic structure of reality is such as I have described.

Asking what consciousness is, is asking an empty question. We all know what consciousness is. It is so self-evident that we would never recognize it if there were no others. Only in others do we meet consciousness, and through the others also in ourselves, by seeing that they are like us. Otherness can in fact be seen as a synonym for consciousness. Others are beings that we can imagine ourselves to exist as. I cannot imagine myself being a stone, but I can imagine myself being an ant. So consciousness is simpler than we think. No scientific problem, no philosophical problem, if only we succeed not to get trapped in the fly bottle, a thing often seen on a philosopher's table.

The experience of seeing consists of the appearing of a content of consciousness we call perception. Reflecting on this content is memory, and it produces another kind of content. So consciousness is a succession of experiential contents, and this succession is called subjective time.

What we call consciousness is perhaps better described by Heidegger by his “concept” of Dasein or by Sartre by his “concept” of for-itself. 'Dasein' means literally 'being there', and the physical world as “ready-to-hand” is part of Dasein's ontological structure. For Sartre the physical world is “in-itself” and is only co-existent with the “for-itself”. So if we combine those two characterizations we can say that a being with consciousness is there for itself. It exists, in the existential sense. And this is all we can say about the “essence” of consciousness, in spite of the 500 pages of Heidegger and 600 pages of Sartre. It must be noted that neither of them had any intention to give a scientific explanation of consciousness, nor did Wittgenstein or any of the great philosophers, and I am sure this was not because they wanted to deny the worth of science.

Science can only find correlations between consciousness and material processes, not identity in the sense of a common conceptual framework. The language of consciousness can perhaps be translated into the language of neuroscience, but a common language is impossible because of the general structure of reality: the subject's consciousness of the world. The first person point of view, which is an essential feature of consciousness, makes it impossible to speak of it in the same language as we speak of material processes.

If it were possible to create a common conceptual framework for consciousness and physical processes, which I doubt, the natural starting point would be consciousness and a phenomenological analysis of our immediate reality. It would proceed from an a priori basis and try to find out how the physical world necessarily appears to consciousness and what it must be like to make the being of consciousness possible and real. If we then find out something that corresponds to the conceptual apparatus of modern physics, we are close to the common language we are seeking. This is not an easy task but theoretically possible, and surely more possible than the other way round. And this approach has the advantage that it can possibly show why there is such a phenomenon as matter or the physical world, which from the materialistic perspective is a given but is in fact a mystery. That consciousness is a given is not a problem. The being of consciousness is not a mystery.

Physical spacetime has a spatial component and a temporal component, but it has no spatial presence in the sense of "here" and no temporal present in the sense of "now". Only a conscious organism has a spatiotemporal location in the universe where it is "here and now". Therefore a subject's consciousness of the world belongs to a totally different category than matter, although matter belongs to its ontological structure.

My body is here and now because I experience it. When I am dead, my body is not here and now. Matter has no presence.

If you could look at my body from a distance of a billion light years, you could not say what its "here and now" is, even if you could describe it accurately. My presence is not my body. I am not my body. My brain does not think. I think with my brain in the same sense as I see with my eyes.

Now someone perhaps suggests that the presence arises from physical presenceless spacetime as its emergent property, but that sounds absurd to me.

A cloud is at location (x,y,z,t) but not here and now. I am here and now. You have your own here and now that I can observe if I am close enough. But the stone I am looking at has no presence of its own either in the sense of 'here' or in the sense of 'now'. This makes us different from stones and clouds.

I am here and now. Yesterday I had yesterday's here and now. But the cloud I am looking at has no 'here and now', and has never had any kind of presence in the sense I am speaking of that fundamental phenomenon.

How can matter have presence to itself? Other people have their own presence of course.

There are other people, you for instance. You have your presence but your pen has only your presence. Just to clarify what I mean by presence.

This is what makes human history different from cosmic history: we speak of projects and intentions rather than brain processes. "Alea iacta est" refers to a decisive "here and now" of Caesar.

What is the "now" of a stone? It can only be defined in relation to an observer, and if that observer is far from the stone, the "now" of the stone cannot be defined, because it depends on the speed of the observer in relation to the stone, and if there is no observer, there is only the worldline of the stone without a "now" and without a "here". But if the stone were conscious, it would have its own succession of presences. This would be panpsychism.

All this means that the identity hypothesis is false, and so is property dualism, because matter without presence cannot generate presences. We must turn the picture upside down.

We are not accidental phenomena in the barren universe. The universe is our universe, our home. It is the playground for our relations with each other. And by 'we' I mean all the subjects of the world, but not clouds or stones - or computers.

What makes a conscious presence different from the "presence" of a material object? A material object has a "presence" only in relation to the genuine presence of an observer. In itself it has no presence at all. It is the original situation of a conscious being, and therefore it has no objective reference to anything outside of it. It is what makes us different from our instruments and the material objects in our universe. It is what makes us us.

I think we are misusing the word 'here' if our phones say they are "here". At least this is not the original meaning. And I am speaking of the original meaning now. The phone is located at a place which is in relation to the presence of its owner or the coordinate system we have made. Without such a reference point no one could say at which point of its worldline it is. And even if that were possible, it would not be its presence, only its location.

It does not really matter if my yesterday's presence was me or someone else. What matters is whether the worldline is conscious or not, because consciousness is essentially a succession of experiential contents or presences in the original meaning of the term. What I am trying to say is that conscious and non-conscious processes are radically different.

A pen has no presence.

Observing distant conscious events means observing presences: intentions, projects and so on. And these presences are fixed within themselves. The objective "presence" of those events can only be determined in relation to some arbitrary coordinate system.

I reject the materialistic starting point which seems to be what many philosophers have committed to without reflecting on this commitment. My starting point is the subject's consciousness of the world, a kind of a triadic structure from which none of the three components can be removed.

I have a location, or many locations, or a worldline, but also presence, and my presence is something much more fundamental than my location. I can be at location x or location y along my timeline seen from the origo of a well-defined coordinate system, but at each point I am also present if I am a conscious being. When I said that it does not matter if I was someone else yesterday, I meant that a presence is a presence independent of whose presence is in question, as long as it is a conscious being. What makes the identity of an individual subject is another question. So presence is always subjective, whereas location is objective. But also the bodies of subjects have their worldlines and locations on arbitrary reference frames.

I think we have more or less forgotten ourselves, our existence, and its fundamental role in the structure of reality. There is no universe in itself, independent of subjects. The universe is a community of subjects. The basic structure of reality is: (1) the subject's (2) consciousness of (3) the world. None of these three components can be removed without destroying everything. Of course the being of the world does not depend on the being of any individual subject, but it depends on the being of the community of subjects, without which the being of the world loses its meaning, reason of being and, if we think of it to the bitter end, its very being.

In the above structure the world is what we usually call nature, everything we meet around us and get to know by empirical means. Consciousness is what I have called 'presence' . It is always a subject's presence. Therefore it is also private, which is another of its essential properties. So what makes the being of a subject totally different from the being of a non-conscious object is that a subject is present and its being is private. But also private worlds can communicate with each other, as we all do all the time.

A conscious being has a location, which is not different from the location of a non-conscious being, but it has also its own inner presence, which is something altogether different.

Only conscious beings are present in the double meaning of the word as 'here' and 'now'.
Non-conscious and conscious beings have a spatiotemporal location in relation to the presences of conscious beings.

You cannot apply the concept of 'presence' defined as 'here' and 'now' to your pen. Your pen has a location at your presence, but it has no presence of its own.

My standpoint is subjective, following the tradition from Descartes to Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and so on. None of them asked how the being of consciousness can be explained from the being of matter. They knew what consciousness is. And so do we all. We have only forgotten it.

A subject indeed has a kind of a solipsistic relationship to the world, but what I am saying is that if there is no single subject in the universe, has never been and will never be, there is no sense and no justification in saying that there is a universe at all.

1. The worldline of my pen can only be defined by me or a community of subjects in relation to some spatiotemporal coordinate system which can also be defined only by subjects. Now my pen has a succession of spatiotemporal locations on that worldline, each somewhere "there" seen from my presence "here" and "now".

2. If my pen were conscious, it would be "here" and "now" at each of its locations, and those "heres" and "nows" would be different from my "here" and "now". It would be an other for me. My pen is not an other. It is my instrument. Another's presence is like my yesterday's presence if my personal continuity is ignored.

So it is impossible to eliminate the subject's presence, also called consciousness, from our view of reality, if that view wants to be something more than an abstraction.

The universe objectively existed before there were subjects, but the universe exists and has always existed in relation to the subjects there are, whenever those subjects happen to live. Without subjects there can be no universe. Without subjects there can be nothing. The universe is a spatiotemporal totality. Can you really imagine a universe without subjects if you think about it deeper than in the usual, superficial way?

The being of objects depends on the being of subjects, although not on the being of any individual subject. The concept of an object implies a relation which is not only epistemological but also ontological.

The subjects of the universe are also in relation to the subjectless past of the universe like I am in relation to my unconscious past. I admit that this idea may sound a bit strange, but think of it like the past of the universe in a way only gets its existence with conscious beings in the future because it evolves for the being of those conscious beings. This is what I mean when I say that the universe is a totality. And because this totality necessarily contains subjects, it necessarily exists as a totality, including its subjectless past. I am not sure if I can explain this clearly enough, but I hope some day I'll find better words.

However, I find this view both consistent and obvious. It is something like Wittgenstein's remark about dying: if all subjects are removed, the world does not change, it only ceases to exist. So there are two kinds of possible annihilation of the world: destroying the world and destroying the subject.

My pen's relation to me is not the same kind of relation as my relation to my pen. My finger's relation to my pen is the same kind of relation as my pen's relation to me. There is a fundamental difference between subjective and objective relations.

The "here and now", or presence, is exactly what we mean by consciousness, and if that presence is removed from the whole universe, there is no justification of saying that the universe exists.

To use a simplified metaphor: the universe can be thought of as a "thing" with consciousness as its essential property. Therefore the universe cannot be thought of as being without consciousness. The being of consciousness is the ontological precondition of existence in general.

A subjective viewpoint to an object does not necessarily make the object subjective, it only makes its appearance subjective. Each of us sees an object from a different perspective, but the object itself remains the same. Also we have some common ways of seeing things as Kant pointed out. But the noumenon is still there.

So I am not denying the objective reality. I am denying the possibility that there can be any objective reality without there being the subjective reality as necessarily related with the objective reality. An object is objectively there, but it needs the being of some subject for its being objectively there.

So whenever there is a subject, it sees the same reality, but if there were no subjects, which is impossible, there would be nothing, which is impossible and self-contradictory.

Reality does not care how we see it, but we must be there to guarantee its being. This is also how Wittgenstein saw it: the "metaphysical" subject must be there as an ontological precondition of the being of the world, whatever the world happens to be like.

In my definition an ant may be a subject but a stone is not. A stone does not see, for instance.

If two subjects see an apple in the same way so that they can agree on what it is like, this is not only because those subjects are similar but primarily because the apple appears to them in the same way, and it appears to them in the same way because it is the same apple with certain objective properties. What those properties are can only be studied with increasing accuracy, by science for instance. But here we come to the question of what is true and what is not. There can also be false appearances. So things are what they are, not other things. But the being of things depends on the being of subjects. However, it does not depend on the being of any individual subject. If an individual subject dies, there are other subjects that make the being of objects real. If all subjects were removed from the world, which is impossible, the world would not change much, it would only lose its existence. And it must be expressed this way, even if it looks paradoxical.

I have found that this distinction between the subject's role in defining the object and the role that the being of the subject has in the being of the object is very difficult to see. I think this goes beyond the Copernican revolution of Kant.

'Presence' is just our everyday "here and now", being in the world as experiencing subjects, as opposed to our instruments and other objects that are at our presence or somewhere else in the universe as being in themselves, without a presence of their own.

I only wanted to describe, with the obvious paradox, the hypothetical and impossible situation that there are no subjects, no points of view to the world. No point of view, no world. If life ends some time, it has nevertheless been, and when it has been, there has been an objective world for it. Now we come to the difficult question of the relation between subjective time and physical time, and the question whether the subjective present is eternal. I think it must be, because else there would be a point when existence changes into nothingness, which is absurd. Being does not depend on time, so that now there is being and then there is no being. Time is one of the basic components in the structure of being, along with the triadic structure 'the subject is conscious of the world'. This means that there is always some manifestation of subjectivity, a presence in relation to which the world exists. But this reasoning leads us quite deep into metaphysics and to the theory of generic subjective continuity.

How can a computer have presence? It is an extension of our brains, and even our brains have no presence of their own. They only make the content of our presence what it is, in contact to their environment of course.

Consciousness is an on-off phenomenon. If a being has subjective experiences, it is conscious, if it has no subjective experiences, it is not conscious. There are no borderline cases. But where the border is in nature, I do not know. We can only infer and guess from the behavior of animals, plants and stones. Some beings, like robots, can also simulate consciousness, because we have programmed them to do so.

This is a paradigm shift in regard to the nowadays dominant materialistic and physicalistic way of thinking, but not in regard to the transcendentalist tradition of Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Wittgenstein an so on. And it does not conflict with empirical evidence, it is only a different ontological interpretation of them. Why the paradigm change is necessary is because it solves some of our most crucial existential problems, which the physicalistic approach cannot do: the problems of death and foreign minds for instance, which I have written about elsewhere. And isn't it obvious that without us, our consciousness, there can be nothing? This should not be so difficult to see. Heidegger called this forgetting our existence 'falling' or 'thrownness into the world', meaning that we only see the world, not ourselves.

My interpretation leaves science where it is. I trust empirical science like a goat trusts in its horns. When I kick a stone, I feel the empirical facts in my foot. But there are no facts if I am not there, in one form or another, in the role of an ant for instance. If there were only ants in the universe, the universe would only exist in relation to some individual ant at a time, and each of them in proper time and place. This is what I have called 'presence'. So when I use the word 'I' it does not mean only my personal subjecthood, but subjecthood in general, which manifests itself as individual subjects.

This is a strong interpretation, I admit, and I do not expect that anyone accepts it straightaway, but I do not see why the importance and fundamental role of consciousness is so difficult to see. One can also draw different metaphysical conclusions from it as long as the basic idea of the subject-object interdependence is accepted.

We must extend the fundamental role of the subject to more than knowing, to the level of the basic ontological structure of reality. And why this must be done is based on an insight about what existence means. Existence without subjects does not make sense, not even the existence of objects. An object, or what we call matter, is only co-existent with subjective existence and presupposes it. All this is evident to me, but maybe our present physicalistic way of looking at things makes it difficult to understand and accept.

It seems to be difficult to accept the view that the universe can have a sort of natural teleology, the same sort of teleology as a human organism has. It is not accidental that the human organism is conscious, although it is not conscious in its early development. In the same way the universe was empty of conscious beings during most of its history. This is the holistic view of the universe I am suggesting. It is a cosmological and metaphysical hypothesis of course, but it has nothing to do with abiogenesis or the Copernican or Mediocrity principle. Of course life has arisen from lifeless matter, and of course we are only a tiny part of the huge cosmos with much dead matter, because that is what our existence needs for its concrete realization. So I want to turn the physicalistic picture of the world upside down. The universe is a spatiotemporal "thing" with consciousness as its essential and necessary property, and because it is necessary, the universe as a totality cannot exist without it.

There was the famous comment of Schopenhauer on Kant's transcendental idealism: "The world is in my head and my head is in the world." The latter part of the sentence is true: my head is indeed in the world, as part of the world like a stone is part of the world. But the first part is not what Kant had in mind. He and later Husserl studied how the objects of the world are constituted in consciousness, or how we can be conscious of the world. My head is just one object among others.

But what Kant and Husserl did not study, as far as I remember, is the question of the being of consciousness and subjecthood and their relation to the being of objects. They did not want to go deeper into metaphysics, but I think this question can be studied with the usual methods of phenomenological ontology in the same way as other existential questions, as for instance Heidegger and Sartre have demonstrated with their own philosophical journeys. None of them studied exactly this question though.

What is the difference between the universe with conscious beings and the universe without conscious beings? It is the simple fact that the latter does not exist. Its being is not logically possible.

Saying that the subjectless universe is logically impossible is a bit provocative, but I stay with that claim. We cannot posit the being of a world where we are not in, or part of. It would lead to a reductio ad absurdum.

I have a holistic view on the universe and also on a human organism. If there is one human organism or any other organism in the universe that is a subject, then it is meaningful to speak of there being a universe, else not. This being of the subject defines the very meaning of existence, also the existence of material objects, which are only co-existent with conscious subjects. It is logically impossible to posit the being of something with which we have no kind of relationship, except as an internally inconsistent abstraction.

So a human organism is a totality with conscious and non-conscious phases, but its consciousness defines the world around it, also the being of the world. And if it is not conscious, others are, and if there are no others, there are no subjects, and there is nothing, which is absurd. Reductio ad absurdum. But the nonexistence of the hypothetical universe without subjects is a different kind of nonexistence than the nonexistence of an object in the world, like the nonexistence of unicorns or the nonexistence of a planet between Earth and Venus. The existence or nonexistence of the world only depends on the being or non-being of the subject, not on the other content of the world. This is also paradoxical, and therefore there can be only the universe we live in, the universe with subjects, our universe. All other universes are abstractions from our universe, like a unicorn is an abstraction from animals we know. But a unicorn is a much more rational abstraction than the universe without inhabitants.

I do not know the details of the physical change needed for matter to become conscious, and I guess no one knows. Perhaps it has something to do with the possibility of managing information for the arising consciousness. But I claim that consciousness, or the subject, is there already as a potentiality of using that information. My view is more like an ontological standpoint than a clear view on the concrete situation.

I have a holistic view of the universe, meaning that the universe is a spatio-temporal totality. Physical time can be thought of as a dimension, as opposed to subjective time. Consciousness is an essential "property" of this totality, but the early stages of the universe were also necessary in the same way as the existence of the fetus is necessary for the existence of the conscious human being. The world has also its becoming, which means becoming conscious in the form of individual conscious beings.

You exist for yourself and others. But if there is no me, no you, or anyone else experiencing anything, has never been or will never be, then there is no way of positing being of any kind, except as an internally inconsistent abstraction. This is the "provocative" part of my reasoning. And the syllogism is therefore:

if there are no conscious beings in the universe seen as a spatiotemporal totality
then there is nothing, which is absurd and self-contradictory
therefore there are necessarily conscious beings in the universe seen as a spatiotemporal totality.

Positing the existence of unicorns is rational because it is logically possible that there are such creatures in the world, but positing the world without subjects is the most irrational thing I can imagine.

When I wake up from a dreamless sleep, something changes, also in my brain I suppose. But in sleep as well as awake there are brain processes. I do not know if neuroscientists have detected the difference on the physiological level, but then there is, of course, the decisive phenomenological difference between conscious and unconscious, and also between conscious and non-conscious, a stone for instance. What makes me wake up and start using my brains as a conscious subject? Any ideas? This is a mystery for me. And as I have said, I think this difference has much to do with being and non-being in general.

It looks like the change, whatever it is, must happen for the subject, to "wake it up" from its potentiality to actuality. Something in nature "pushes" the organism awake. But I think the potentiality for consciousness, or the "metaphysical subject", must have been already there as the basis of the unknown properties of the singularity from which everything started.

We cannot escape existence, so what else can we do than play! Interestingly, this seems to be what also Sartre thought in Being and Nothingness. Ludere necesse est, vivere non est necesse.

In my thinking consciousness is a synonym for subjective experiencing, or presence, as I have said. It has nothing to do with the "immaterial mind", whatever that could mean. And if we see the universe as a spatiotemporal "thing" as I have described it a bit metaphorically, then it exists for any one subject that has ever existed in the universe, but not in any other sense of existing. And this is not a conclusion that can be achieved with a strict and formal logical reasoning, it is more like a phenomenological intuition of the absurdity of positing existence of a world with which we cannot logically have any kind of relationship.

The subject is already there "objectively", only not yet conscious.

I think that also material things are essential for the existence of what is fundamentally essential: the subject and its consciousness of the world, or presence. It is not necessary that an individual fetus develops to a conscious human being, but given that there are human beings, some of them must become conscious. And if there were no human beings, there must be some other conscious beings somewhere, and in that case we would be those beings. And, as I said, if there were no conscious beings anywhere, any time in the universe, there would be no universe in any meaningful sense of being or existing. And when I speak about necessity, the necessity of the being of consciousness is more like logical necessity, and the necessity of the way the world is constructed as the instrument for the being of consciousness is connected with the question of whether the laws of physics are logically necessary or not.

How can we posit even the possibility of the being of something we have no relationship with? We have a relationship with unicorns in the sense that there is a place for them in the logical space and in our world, but for a world without subjects we have no logical space. Therefore it is an absurdity, and only if an absurdity is possible, the world without inhabitants is possible.

No one has witnessed the big bang, but its being or non-being is still in relation to our being there, existing. Saying that the big bang just happened to create an uninhabited or inhabited world seems natural, but is in fact an unjustified and internally inconsistent abstraction. We tend to forget our own existence and its essential nature in the structure of reality.

Consciousness did not emerge from anything. Something emerged from the necessity of the being of consciousness, namely the complexity of our universe, to make consciousness concretely existing in the concrete world, because there cannot be consciousness in itself, floating around in emptiness. So God did not create the world, the subject did for its own project of being, whatever that project is. Consciousness is the manifestation of this project. If we think of it carefully, what else is there but us?

My holistic view of the universe means, for instance, that the essential features of it, especially the being of consciousness, explain its origin and development. I do not think that this conflicts with science, only deepens our understanding of what lies behind scientific facts.

Another attempt to clarify my point: I have written: "If I did not exist, there would be nothing", which at first sight seems not only paradoxical but false. When someone dies, the world does not cease to exist. But the situation between me and another is not symmetrical. When someone dies, I still exist, and many others still exist, and we can say the famous phrase "I am". Even if ants were the only conscious subjects in the world, there would still be a sense in saying "I am" in the case of an individual ant, although it could not express it as clearly as Descartes. Descartes doubted the existence of the world, and he could doubt it because he was certain that the "I am" was true. But if there is no "I am" that can be said of any subject, there is no doubting, no certainty, no perspective to the world. The whole world vanishes away, which is absurd, and this is the reason why there necessarily must be subjects in the universe if it makes any sense to speak of the existence of the universe. An uninhabited universe is an abstraction beyond being and non-being.

Imagine that you are the only conscious being in the universe. You see that the universe is objectively there although you do not see all of it. Then you die, for good. Where is the universe now? What now? There is no now or here. There is nothing and there has never been anything, because there is no time. It is exactly the same as if you had never existed, and the universe had never existed. Therefore such a universe cannot exist. All existence presupposes a "here and now", a presence, to exist. And this presence is the "I am", a subject's conscious being in the world that gets its existence from that presence, giving the subject its concrete existence in turn. The subject-object relationship cannot be broken without destroying all being.

Presence is not a property in the sense we usually speak of properties. It is something much more fundamental, part of the basic ontological structure of reality.

There are places with which we have no relationship, but this lack of relationship is a lack of relationship with us. If there are no 'us', there is nothing with which we lack relationship, and its being can only be posited as an abstraction with no real meaning. We cannot say anything about its being or non-being. In this sense it cannot exist, in another sense of existing than the existence of objects. Now you may say that I posit its non-being, but in fact I posit the absurdity of its being, which is practically the same thing. I do not believe in the existence of absurdities.

The non-conscious universe is a logical impossibility. This insight has far-reaching metaphysical and existential consequences.

An uninhabited universe is a mental construct, nothing more.

We need no transcendent God. The absolute is in us. When I spoke about the subject's project, and did not say what that project is, that was deliberate. You are the subject. Ask yourself what you want. Do you want to live for ever? Do you want to die for good? Do you want to understand what existence is, what others are, what the universe is, what is the sense of all this, if any? Perhaps the subject wants to understand its own being through the world and others. And who are the others? But you are the subject. You should know. I do not know. But as the subject, I cannot escape existence, and this original situation is perhaps the origin of this mysterious phenomenon of living in this mysterious universe.

So I guess you want me to tell the difference between conscious and non-conscious. The reason why I have not done that as clearly as you want, is perhaps because we all know the difference. The phenomenological difference is the same as the difference between being awake and being in dreamless sleep. In sleep we skip a piece of physical time within our subjective time, and a stone has no subjective time. So the question is a sort of a pseudo question. And as to the physiological correlates of this difference, we should ask neuroscientists. However, the conscious-nonconscious question cannot be reduced to physiology or physics.

An uninhabited universe is our mental construct. It is an abstraction from our inhabited universe, which is the only universe there is, by definition. And we cannot posit anything beyond our universe, because it has no place in the logical space. As I said, we can easily posit the existence of unicorns in our universe, because there is a logical and spatiotemporal place for them. But we cannot find a place for a subjectless world, because when we think we have found it, we must admit that we have only found a place within our own logic, which presupposes our existence. I am not sure if I am saying this clearly enough.

If we speak of another universe with another type of presence, it is really the one and only universe we have, by my definition of the universe, as if the two universes put together to make the real universe. And this universe can only have one type of presence, because there is only one type of presence, the one which makes the distinction to non-presence.

I am speaking of the hypothetical and logically inconsistent universe with no presence, which means no inhabitants.

Logic presupposes existence, and if we are speaking of the universe as a whole, we cannot logically posit a universe without existence. This is logic. And this is intuition. They are not opposites.

What I am saying is extremely simple and obvious, but it is so close to our existence, being in fact at the core of existence itself, that no one seems to get the point. But it has important consequences.

To sum up: Positing the possibility of something we need a logical space in which to posit it. Our logical space is within the structure 'the subject – the world'. Logic does not reside in a Platonic heaven. So, if we want to posit the possibility of the whole universe, whatever its content, we must posit it somewhere within that basic structure. Its place may vary within this structure, meaning that the facts of the world can be anything, but it must always have the structure 'the subject – the world'. Therefore a subjectless universe is logically impossible.

Remember that there is only one universe, by definition.

About the subject-world relationship:

Take Wittgenstein. He thought that the “metaphysical subject” is an ontological precondition for the being of the world. Of course he did not mean any individual subject, but a subject in general, a subject that gets its properties from the world, being itself without properties.

Also logic presupposes the being of the world. He says:

5.552 The “experience” which we need to understand logic is not that such and such is the case, but that something is; but that is no experience.
Logic precedes every experience—that something is so. It is before the How, not before the What.
5.5521 And if this were not the case, how could we apply logic? We could say: if there were a logic, even if there were no world, how then could there be a logic, since there is a world?

In this scenario, which I share, the positing of a possible world without subjects is indeed logically impossible, because the logical space to posit it is always within the subject-world structure.

A subject can logically try to posit a possible world of any kind, but because that world must fit into the logical space within the structure of 'subject-world', which is our logical universe, so to speak, the possible world we really posit cannot be without subjects. The weak point which I challenged you to attack on, is the question of where logic itself stands in our reality, and if it stands in our reality at all. So if you look what Wittgenstein says about it, you can oppose him or not. But if you agree with him, as I do, the logical conclusion should be clear.

Just to remind us about the distinction between logical and physical possibility: It is logically possible that a pink unicorn suddenly appears in front of us, weighing 178,4 kilograms, floating in the air and breaking all laws of physics. That pretty creature fits into the logical space of our logical universe, although not into our physical universe. And note the little word 'our'.

Now if you admit that it is logically impossible for a subject to posit the being of a world with no subjects, then who can posit the logical possibility of the being of such a world? If no one, where does this logical possibility come from? Does the logical universe extend beyond the subject-world structure? And if so, if logic precedes the being of the world, so that some Platonic principle says that there can be worlds without subjects, what relevance can such a principle have? How can we ever use that kind of logic? We can only use logic within the subject-world dipole. That basic ontological structure defines the limits of our logical universe. That the being of x is logically possible means that it is possible for a subject or other unknown principle to posit the being of x into the logical universe. And if it is not possible, it is impossible.

When we speak about the logical possibility of a being, we must define the logical space in the logical universe where the possibility of that being can or cannot be posited. If the possibility of that being lies outside of the limits of the logical universe, it can be said that positing the possibility of that being is logically impossible or absurd, or that it makes no sense to speak of its possibility. Which one of these expressions we should use, we can discuss, but I think they all lead to the same: impossibility. Now the logical universe can or cannot extend beyond our logical universe: the logical universe where we can use logic. My position, and also Wittgenstein's, is that the logical universe coincides with our logical universe, which means that the subject-world relationship defines the limits for what is logically possible.

A world cannot be an object for the subjects of another world. There is only one world. We must speak about alternate worlds or possible worlds. Now it is not logically possible that there is a world without subjects in our logical universe, which is the only logical universe within which we can use logic. The possibility of a world without subjects lies outside of the logical universe, because it lies outside of the subject-world relationship. Therefore all possible worlds have a subjective viewpoint and necessarily contain subjects.

So, I can logically posit the possibility of a world in which I do not exist as an individual subject, but I cannot logically posit a world without subjects. And because no subject can posit that kind of a world, we cannot speak about its possibility. Its possibility is beyond all logic. Therefore its being is not logically possible if we use logic in the usual way.

About abstractions:

A unicorn is an abstraction that fits perfectly into our logical universe, and makes sense as part of a possible world.

A Christian's Heaven is a beautiful abstraction and extension of our world, and makes a perfect example of a possible world, with all its inhabitants, although only some of us believe it is real.

A world without inhabitants is an abstraction of our world that does not belong to the group of possible worlds, because its possibility of being lies outside of the limits of our logical universe, outside of the subject-world relationship. It is a "forbidden" world.

Just to avoid misunderstanding, my view is a metaphysical interpretation of reality as a whole, and it does not take a stand on whether consciousness is part of the QM phenomena. It does not conflict with naturalism, it is an interpretation of natural phenomena as they are described by science, and in particular an interpretation of our existential situation. If it is self-contradictory or in conflict with science, and someone shows this, I am of course immediately ready to give up everything I have thought so far.

If proposing the fundamental nature of the subject-world relationship is idealism, then I am an ontological idealist, as many of our most famous philosophers have been.

Someone has said that a philosophical discussion is impossible, because we speak about different things. Each of us has a different horizon, a way of thinking, perhaps built during many decades, and only in the context of that horizon understanding is possible. But also philosophical monologues can be interesting sometimes.

My interpretation is that the laws of physics are such that they make the cosmic and biological evolution possible and necessary, also the evolution towards consciousness. So the essential nature of consciousness is the driving force of the universe. That matter behaves according to the principles of causality and randomness does not conflict with this. I am trying to answer the 'why' questions without getting in conflict with the 'hows' of science.

I can easily posit the possibility of an objective world and the objective existence of other subjects. The only thing I cannot logically posit is the world without inhabitants. Objects are objective in relation to a subject. They are the same objects for every subject. Also a subject's consciousness is "objective". It is what it is. It is perhaps the most objective phenomenon there is. Only the subject's relationship with objects changes. Therefore there are varying perspectives to objects. If the objects were not the same objects for every perspective, there would not be any sense of speaking of truth and falsity. Now this is important: the being of an individual subject does not define the being of the world, but there must be some manifestation of subjectivity, or presence, or consciousness, to logically posit the possibility of the being of the world. A world without subjects is outside of the logical universe, the logical space, within which we can posit anything. And what is outside of the use of logic is absurd and impossible. It is not a logical contradiction, it is a logical reductio ad absurdum, but it leads to the same conclusion as a contradiction: impossibility. We can do this reasoning because we are living here in our universe with inhabitants, to limit the group of possible worlds to those with inhabitants. If there is a weak point in my reasoning, it is the validity of the premise that the subject-world relationship defines the limits of the logical universe, but no one has so far attacked on that.

As seen from above, even if an intuition is clear, it is sometimes very difficult to put into words and logical statements. But what I am trying to do is to lead to my way of thinking, sometimes using unusual expressions.

The being of objects is independent of the being of an individual subject, but not independent of the being of the subject in one form or another. Have you ever thought about what the limits of our logical universe are, the logical space where we can posit the possibility of objects and possible worlds?

You can posit an abstraction of a world without subjects, as if floating in the air, but that is not a possible world, because a possible world can be posited only into the logical universe limited by the subject-world relationship, the logical space where we can use logic. As I wrote, a world cannot be an object for the subjects of another world, because there is only one world. We must speak of alternate or possible worlds. We cannot posit the possibility of a subjectless world in place of our world, because logic itself defines that it must be posited within the subject-world relationship. And even if there were parallel worlds, as in the multiverse scenario, those parallel worlds would be parallel in relation to our world, a world with inhabitants, and the world as I define it would be our world + all the parallel worlds. So there is one world, by definition, and that world is inhabited.

Logical statements are valid only within the logical universe, which in my view is limited by the subject-world relationship, because that is the logical universe where we can use logic. Logic does not reside in a Platonic heaven. It precedes the facts of the world, but not the being of the world. And its use presupposes the being of the user. So the being and use of logic presupposes the being of an inhabited world.

So what can a subject posit into the logical universe if that logical universe is limited by the subject-world relationship?

We posit possibilities, because that is what we do in logic. We can posit the possibility of the being of a material object, like a stone, into an arbitrary place in the physical universe, even if we have no causal connection with that place. We can also posit abstractions like the being of a unicorn into arbitrary places in the physical universe. We can posit all kinds of possible worlds and extensions of our world as long as they are inhabited, because they fit into the logical universe delimited by the subject-world relationship, which defines the basic ontological structure of reality. But we cannot consistently posit a possible world without subjects, although at first sight we think we can, because that kind of a world is an abstraction from our own universe grounded perhaps on our knowledge of the uninhabited regions and early stages of our universe, and this abstraction lies outside of our logical universe for reasons I have given. Therefore its being is logically impossible, whereas the being of unicorns is only physically impossible. As I said, it is a "forbidden" world.

Logic cannot precede the being of the world or the subject-world structure, it only precedes facts. Logic cannot be used outside of the subject-world relationship, and what cannot be used, has no use. Such logic would have no relevance. We can limit the logical universe from within logic, by reductio ad absurdum, just because we can use logic.

This seems to be very difficult to explain in spite of its self-evidence for me. It seems to demand some kind of change in the way of thinking, a more reflective attitude. And I also think that we are here at the core of what idealism really means, its logical foundation. And I do not mean subjective idealism.

The logic of imagining is the same as the logic of having a dream. You can have a dream about unicorns, you can have a dream about Heaven if you are a Christian and believe in Heaven, but what would it be like to have a dream about the world without inhabitants? Perhaps it would be something like a desert with nobody anywhere - except you. Imagining a universe without subjects is like looking at the universe from outside, saying: "Wow, there is a universe with no inhabitants!" But you are not outside. You are doomed to be an insider. You cannot cry: "Stop the world, I want to get out!"

In my definition consciousness = the subject's immediate experiencing the world = presence = the content of present experiencing. Other versions are also available. But it is on-off: the subject is or the subject is not. And the world where the subject is not, is not logically possible, and the being of the subject keeps the universe existing. Where the subject is in nature is irrelevant in this context.

The being of the universe depends on the being of subjects, because 'being' makes no logical sense otherwise.

We cannot prove or disprove this kind of a statement logically, using a formal procedure, only through showing the limits of logic, showing that the positing of the possibility of a subjectless world is without any meaning because it lies outside of the limits of logic.

Logically we need the concept of 'subject' that experiences the world. But it is not a "thing", it gets its properties from the world, being itself without properties.

I see the subject as the same kind of "metaphysical subject" as Wittgenstein in Tractatus, a kind of a reference point for the facts of the world.

I do not want to be a thing. And I am not a thing.

Either there is a content of experience or not. If there is not, then we skip a piece of physical time and our subjective existence continues without a break. So, in fact , there cannot be such a phenomenon as subjective nonexistence.

I have said that the ontological structure of reality is 'the subject - the world'. This is the structure that Wittgenstein in his Notebooks 1914-1916 calls “the two godheads”. The being of the subject depends on the being of the world and the being of the world depends on the being of the subject. So, as W. says in Tractatus,”the world is my world”, and in death “the world does not change but ceases”. But we must interpret this so that the world ceases for an individual subject, not the subject in general, because we know that the world does not end when someone dies. As long as there are subjects in the world, having a relationship to the world, we can meaningfully say that the world exists. It exists if there is a presence in subjective time, any time, anywhere.

So the subject – world relationship is the ontological precondition for the being of the world, any possible world. And it is also the ontological precondition for the being of the subject and any of its individual manifestations, individual subjects like me and all of us. If it were possible to remove the world, nothing would be left, and if it were possible to remove all subjects, nothing would be left. But fortunately it is not possible to remove either of them, so we do not need to worry about the end of the world.

So my claim that it is logically impossible to imagine or posit the possibility of a world without inhabitants is based on the ontological limitations for the application of logic. We cannot apply logic outside of the logical universe defined by the subject – world relationship. We can posit abstract objects like unicorns as part of a possible world, and there is no problem with that, because they fit perfectly into the logical universe defined by the ontology described above, but the possibility of a subjectless world lies outside of its limits.

In short: we can posit all kinds of possible objects into our world, and all kinds of possible worlds as long as their possibility lies inside the logical universe. But the world is not an object, and a world without inhabitants is not a possible world because its logical possibility is not inside the logical universe.

All abstractions are not possible. In relation to the world we are not spectators, we are participants. And we cannot escape that position. As I said, a good rule for finding out what is possible and what is not, is this: think about the possibility of having a dream of it, so you can easily see if it is possible. Imagining and dreaming are not logically very far from each other.

As to the logical universe, I repeat: Logic precedes the facts of the world, so that there are all kinds of possible worlds, but logic does not precede the being of the world. And because the being of the world is an ontological precondition of logic and the being of the subject is an ontological precondition of the being of the world, the limits for using logic are defined by the subject – world relationship.

This is what I mean by saying that it is impossible to consistently imagine a world without subjects.

We have no logical justification to say anything about the being or not being of the hypothetical world without subjects. But then, if there is no logical sense in the being of such a world, we can at least say that its being is impossible to consistently imagine, and because the idea of its being is as absurd as it is, its being can be ruled out by appealing to its absurdity. I think this is what reductio ad absurdum means. And at the moment I think that the correct way of saying it is that its being is logically impossible, in line with the reasoning I have presented. And it is also the only way of saying it in the light of the clear phenomenological intuition of the absurdity of the being of the subjectless world. We must remember that there is only one world, by definition. That the idea of its being without subjects is beyond logic is based on this definition.

I have used many words to explain what I mean, but I can say it with six words:

We cannot get rid of ourselves.

This is my ontology.

The content of consciousness is or is not, that is what I mean by on/off. Clear or diffuse, feeling or thought, aware of self or not, a content follows a content, and there is nothing between.

My reasoning tries to show that positing the possibility of x lies outside of logic, outside of the space where logic can be used. The conclusion cannot be achieved by a logical proof, just because it is outside of the possibilities of using logic. So the impossibility of the original claim is proved by showing that there is no logical justification to make that claim. It is based on the ontology of logic, not logic itself.

There is no such thing as bodily consciousness. The phenomenology of consciousness is such that it is or is not, independent of our noticing or not noticing it.

How would you describe a state that is between conscious and non-conscious? Phenomenologically, not physiologically.

I have said that there are necessarily subjects in the world. However, the subjects are not in the world in the same way as material objects are in the world. Our being in the world, as subjects, means that we are conscious of the world. The world appears to us, or discloses itself for us, more or less. This appearing itself has its material correlate in the world as our bodies have material and spatio-temporal relations to one another and to the rest of the world. A subject, as subject, has no extension, not even a temporal extension, because subjective time consists of successive experiential contents, as the present gets replaced with a new present. The relationship between subjective time and physical time is one of the fundamental questions of philosophy if we want to think of our existence in the universe that we cannot escape from.

When "the light is on" we are conscious, otherwise not. It is on/off. And if it is off, we do not exist in the existential sense and there is a gap in physical time, but not in subjective time. But this is part of the phenomenological definition of consciousness. Therefore I asked you to give a phenomenological description of possible in-between states so that we could get a better definition, a definition that would allow those in-between states. I would say that no such description is possible. You give physiological descriptions and descriptions of behavior, but they are not relevant if we want to define consciousness as it is in itself, as it appears to us in reflection.

1. There is only one world.
2. There are subjects in the world.
3. Only subjects can use logic.
4. The scope of logic is the same as the scope of using logic.
5. The limits of the logical space where a subject can posit possibilities are defined by the subject-world relationship.
6. Therefore, because there is only one world, a subject cannot consistently imagine a world without subjects, because it lies outside of the limits of logic.

By the world I understand a spatiotemporal totality. So either there are subjects in the world or there are not. This does not depend on time or place. And I argue that there are necessarily subjects in the world because the being of the world indeed depends on the being of subjects, or to be precise, on the “metaphysical” subject which Wittgenstein spoke about in Tractatus, a kind of a reference point for the facts of the world. All individual subjects are concrete manifestations of this fundamental ontological principle of subjectivity.

Logic has no meaning outside of its usage. It does not precede the being of the world, although it precedes the facts of the world.

We can posit the possibility of all kinds of abstractions, such as unicorns, and all kinds of possible worlds as long as they fit into the limits of the logical space defined by the subject-world relationship. But we cannot posit the possibility of the world without subjects, because it does not fit into that logical space. The possibility of another world without subjects could be posited and imagined parallel to our world, but there is no other world, as was postulated and defined. So the impossibility of using logic prevents us from positing the possibility of the world without subjects.

All we can consistently imagine must fit into the logical space, the space of possibilities, and this space is necessarily within the limits of the subject-world relationship. As I said, unicorns fit perfectly into that space, but the world without subjects does not. Remember that we try to posit the universe, not an object.

When you say it is easy for you to imagine the world without subjects, I could ask you to describe what such a world might look like. You could describe a desert, for instance, and say that this is the whole universe, and you see how easy it was to imagine. But you are there, and you cannot take the position of an outsider even if you wanted. Even science cannot take that position.

My argument was: it is impossible to consistently posit the possibility of the world without subjects.

To clarify the meaning of 'logical space': If I say that I saw a green cow this morning, this fits into the logical space of colors. But if I say that the universe is green, that is nonsense. Now my premise is that the widest logical space where we can posit possibilities is the space within the limits defined by the subject-world relationship. We can posit all kinds of possibilities into that logical space, as parts of possible worlds, and also all kinds of possible worlds as long as there are subjects in them. If the only subjects in the possible alternate world were rats, and we assume that rats are conscious beings, we can posit such a possible world without problems. But the world without subjects cannot be posited into that space. It is "too large". To say that the world is subjectless is nonsense in the same way as saying that the universe is green. This reasoning is somewhat circular, I admit, but I think we cannot avoid that, because a straightforward logical proof is not possible due to the fact that we are moving on the frontiers of logic. We can only try to understand the idea of this argument, and we can approach this understanding from several directions, until the insight of its truth comes, if it ever comes.

Another approach is based on the on/off nature of consciousness. We can extend this idea to the universe as a whole. Let us imagine that all subjects are suddenly removed from the universe. What is left? Nothing. There is no meaningful way of speaking of the existence of the universe after the "lights are switched off". This is obvious but needs a certain kind of intuition for seeing its self-evidence. But, on the other hand, the sudden disappearance of the world is not possible, it is absurd and paradoxical. Everything cannot just vanish away with switching the light off. The paradox can be resolved only by concluding that there are necessarily subjects in the world. This is a version of reductio ad absurdum.

When I said that I cannot imagine the world without subjects, I meant that I cannot consistently posit the possibility of its existence as an alternative to our world.

It is easy to think of the world without subjects, but impossible to think of its existence. If you understand this difference, you understand my point.

A unicorn is a mental construct with no real correlate even if the possibility of its real correlate were posited. It is the same with the mental construct of the world without subjects, with the difference that even the possibility of its existence cannot be consistently posited.

The possibility of the existence of the world without subjects cannot be posited as real, because it is not an object in the world, not in any possible world. It is the world itself, and that makes the situation completely different. The existence or nonexistence of the world without subjects has nothing to do with what the world looks like, because it is not a possible world. Unicorns are different in this respect. They are or are not part of the world and their being or non-being makes a difference.

My view can perhaps be described as some kind of objective idealism. There is an objective world independent of an individual subject, but its being depends on the basic ontological structure of reality, which is the subject's relationship with the world. Therefore the world without subjects is impossible. This is only a description, I am not trying to prove that it is the only possible metaphysical position.

Of course unicorns belong to our fauna, in their conspicuous absence! But the same cannot be said of the world without subjects.

The basic ontological structure of 'subject-world', which must be taken as a premise because it precedes logic, also defines the logical space where we can posit possibilities. So there is a principle in the ontology of logic which rules out the possibility of positing the existence of the subjectless world.

Another subjectless world can easily be posited parallel with ours, but not an alternative for it.

You are in the universe. And if you are not, it is only part of the universe.

The main point is that the whole subjectless world is nonexistent. If all of us, and I mean all subjects in the world, were zombies, and the whole physical universe were the same as it is now, what would there be? First: there would be no 'us'. Second: there would be no sense in 'existence'. Third: there would be no existence. Fourth: there would be nothing. Paradoxically: the only difference from our present world would be that the hypothetical world would not exist. The world would not end with a bang, it would only cease to exist. And because this is paradoxical and absurd, the only possible conclusion is that there are necessarily subjects in the world.

I think that we do not see clearly enough what 'existence' means. It is too close to us.

In short: consciousness is not everywhere, but its evolution is necessary.

There is no logical route to any ontological standpoint, not to materialism, not to the subject-world structure I am proposing. Ontology precedes logic. A logical proof of my argument is impossible because of the impossibility of using logic outside of the world. But I have given reasons for my standpoint from the premise of the subject-world ontology, and the conclusion is clear. There is no other answer to the question 'why'. But if you do not get it, you go on asking 'why' even if it is unreasonable.

No 'I', no existence. Because that is what existence means. I am not going to prove this. It cannot be proved. But for me it is obvious.

There is no external perspective.

Perhaps this is the subtle difference between materialism and anti-materialism: is the world without subjects existent or nonexistent?

if you posit another world parallel to this one, you can posit it with or without subjects and there is no problem, and we can define the world = this world + all the parallel worlds. But we are positing alternate worlds, and that makes the big difference.

I think language reflects ontology. We live in this world. The word 'this' refers to 'us'. So, if this world were without us, what kind of an ontological leap would that be? We are speaking of an alternate world, aren't we? So the alternate world would be our world without us, without there ever being us. This seems very strange to me.

The transcendent material universe created us. It did not need us, we just appeared here by accident.
The transcendent spiritual God created us. He did not need us, He just decided to create us.

No, if God created us, it was because we demanded it, and if the universe created us, it was because we demanded it.

So God = the universe, and its being depends on our being. To say that the universe without subjects is possible is same kind of nonsense as saying that the transcendent God is possible.

If the subject is off, the light of existence is off. But it cannot be off. There is no such thing as nonexistence. The being of subjects is necessary both ontologically and cosmologically.

By the way, it is not accidental that I use the word 'we' to denote all the subjects in the universe.

I am speaking of a situation where this world of ours does not exist, but the world without subjects could exist instead. And I am saying that it cannot exist.

If we remove the last of us, nothing is left. Without the subject there is nothing. And for the being of the subject there must be at least one individual subject in the world.

The subject-world relationship is the ontological "Archimedean point" of reality. There is nothing without it, and everything that happens, happens within this relationship.

This is my ontology.

I do not think that material objects are conscious, not even our brains or bodies. They are our instruments of existing, like hammers and robots.

For materialists the premise is: matter is the Absolute. For me the premise is: the subject is the Absolute. Which one of these is more reasonable, is the key of all this discussion. Evidence? There is scientific evidence, which must not be ignored. Then there is "existential" evidence, a deep sense of our existential situation and its paradoxes. We must draw conclusions from both.

The subject cannot be aware of itself without a mirror. The world is its mirror.

We have an internal point of view to the world, because we belong to the world.

There is no external point of view to the world, a “God's eye” or something. All perspectives to the world are internal.

We cannot imagine ourselves looking at the world from an external viewpoint and saying: “There are no subjects!” It just makes no sense.

To say that the world without subjects is possible requires a leap from an internal viewpoint to an external viewpoint, from immanence to transcendence. It is a religious leap, and it has no justification.

If this is materialism, materialism is a religion. I am on the immanent side. Matter without the subject is transcendent, the subject is immanent.

The world cannot exist, because there is no reason for its existence. But it exists. Strange!

The subject must exist, because its nonexistence would be self-contradictory. But it cannot exist without the world. So the world exists for the subject.

There is an objective world that all of us share, and the others appear to us as subjects. But without subjects there is nothing. This should not be so difficult to understand. A simple reflective step proves this.

You see a picture of an uninhabited world before your eyes. Suddenly you realize that you are in the picture and cannot get out. It is not the picture you thought it was.

And it disappears.

Philosophers must become poets to understand basic ontology.

Consciousness emerges because it is fundamental. Its emerging is necessary because it is the essence of the universe in the same way as it is essential for a human organism.

The plasma phase was part of the early stages of the becoming of the universe as we experience it, being manifestations of its essence as consciousness, in the same way as the embryo is an early phase of the becoming of the conscious human being.

About emerging.

So there is an uninhabited world with no relationship to subjects. Now subjects emerge from this world - or do not emerge. Think of this latter alternative. What does it mean that such a world exists, instead of this world that we are experiencing? The uninhabited past of our world has meaning because we are here to give it a meaning, and we can say it exists or has existed, but without our being in the world the world and its possible existence has no meaning. Existence without subjects makes no sense. Matter without subjects makes no sense. In the same way as a transcendent God is purely fictitious, also transcendent matter, matter without a relationship with subjectivity, is purely fictitious.

The question is if there must be subjects in the alternate universe seen as a spatiotemporal totality, for us to be able to consistently imagine the world without subjects, an alternate world for our world, not a parallel one. The answer is not as simple as you suggest. Or for me it is simple, but others do not seem to get the point, of which I am a bit surprised. But I admit it requires a reflective insight to see this. We can say that the subject turns the light of existence on or off. And it is never off, because nonexistence is self-contradictory.

So, from the holistic perspective, can we consistently imagine the world without subjects, and can such a world, an alternate or possible world exist? It is a question of what we mean by 'existing'. We can imagine an uninhabited world as an abstraction, as I wrote, but this picture before our eyes proves to be internally inconsistent and the whole idea breaks down. Existence is necessarily related with subjectivity.

From the holistic perspective the being of subjectivity and its individual manifestations is necessary, although it has its history of course, a history of becoming and "emerging" from uninhabited phases, like a conscious human being has its non-conscious history as an embryo. I see the universe, as well as the living organism, as a process of becoming conscious.

If we want to posit the possibility of the existence of something, we must give some meaning to its existence, be able to imagine it. I am arguing that we cannot consistently give any meaning to the existence of the subjectless universe. We only believe we can. It is something like trying to imagine what it is like to not-exist personally. Some have tried and have seen Heavens and Paradises, some others see nothing and say there will be nothing, which means that there is non-being, which is self-contradictory. So there remains a paradox in the case of our personal lives as well as in the case of the universe. The only consistent solution to the paradoxes seems to be the absolute nature of subjectivity.

I know this cannot be proved with formal logic, because of the limitations of logic, but imagining the world without subjects collapses into an internal inconsistency on an a priori basis.

The original argument was that it is possible to imagine the subjectless world, and I am arguing that it is not possible, because its imagining is inconsistent. The positing of such a world loses all meaning, and therefore it is impossible to imagine it in a consistent way.

The problem is that we try to posit a transcendent material world without subjects as the basis of subjects. But why should we posit a world that has no relationship with us? What is the motive to posit such an abstraction as concrete reality? Note that all the uninhabited regions and times of our universe have a relationship with us, because we live in the same universe as those regions.

All this leads to the question of what 'existence' means, and the answer tells the difference between materialists and anti-materialists.

Accident, chance, randomness, genuine probability, are very unclear concepts philosophically, and I would not be surprised if everything would be strictly determined in the end. There seems to be non-locality and so on. Perhaps everything just seems random as we look at our universe from inside.

If I were the only subject in the universe and died for good, the world would cease to exist absolutely, and if there were no subjects, the world would not exist, absolutely. Only if there is the metaphysical subject, which is the ontological precondition of the being of the world, can we say that there is the world or anything at all.

To a materialist I would like to say this:

I guess it is easy for you to imagine you are dead. You may believe that you can experience something also after death, but if not, what then? What has happened? The world has not changed much, it just does not exist. Nothing exists. Nothing has ever existed, because time has ended. But we are still here, and others, and we guarantee that the world exists. If it were possible to somehow remove all of us from the universe, the universe would not exist, and this time absolutely, for there would be no one to guarantee its existence. But the world would not change much, it would only cease to exist. So the world exists and does not exist. This is what logicians call contradiction. And the only way to avoid the contradiction is to understand that existence is always subjective, that there must always be subjects in the universe. Even all the black holes in the universe are subjective in the sense that they have a relationship with our being here and other subjects wherever they happen to be.

Now I am sure you do not see any kind of a paradox or contradiction here, and I claim this is because you have only an external perspective to things, also to yourself. It is the viewpoint of a physicist. I would say you reify yourself. My perspective is internal, subjective, and I see subjective reality as the basic reality we are in. When I die, others say some cells die, and time goes on, but in fact time ends if death is the final event.

I can understand your external point of view somehow, but only somehow, and I think it is not an adequate way of seeing things. So our disagreement seems to be very deep in the core of things. It all concentrates on the question of whether the hypothetical world without subjects can or cannot exist. So it is a question of the meaning of 'existence'. For me existence is subjective, for you objective, seen from the perspective of physics. So we speak different languages, and I do not think they can be translated into each other.

To make a short summary of my position:

The subject is the absolute.
The subject needs the world for its being and self-awareness.
Therefore the subject-world relationship is the Archimedean point or reality. Without it there is nothing, and everything that happens, happens within this relationship.

The subject-world relationship is not a relationship of perceiving, knowing or experiencing. It is a relationship of being. There are many objects in the universe that are not objects of our consciousness or any other subject's consciousness, but their being, and the being of the whole universe, depends on the being of subjectivity and its manifestations as individual subjects. For an object to exist it need not be an object of experiencing, but there must be someone experiencing something.

The being of the subject is an on/off "phenomenon". If the subject is "off", the world is "off", and there is nothing. But if we are not materialists we understand that there is no nothingness. So the subject is always "on". But it can be anywhere any time in the universe, and in fact its being defines all times and places in the universe.

The subject is the absolute, but it is not God. It is me and you, and I do not think either of us is God. There is nothing supernatural in this.

Being is, non-being is not. Being is presence, an ever-changing present, eternal. Take away the presence, nothing is left. But it cannot be taken away, so there is no nothingness. The being of the subject is causa sui, the being of matter would be inconceivable without it.

Something can be without appearing to anyone, but it cannot be without the being of someone. Only the being of the subject makes it exist.

The being of matter and the being of the subject are interdependent, but the being of the subject makes the being of matter understandable.

When something happened in our solar system about 4 billion years ago and Earth and Moon took their shape, I think no one was witnessing this. It was the object of no subject's experience. But the being of that event can be said to exist only because we are here trying to figure out what happened. And if not we, then perhaps some other conscious animal, if evolution had a different course. The being of the subject and the being of the universe and their relationship of being is not the same as their direct relationship where the universe is an object of consciousness for the subject.

The impossibility of the subjectless universe is obvious. It is based on an intuition of nothingness and its absurdity.

Descartes made the mistake that he interpreted his insight to mean that there is a "soul-substance", res cogitans, but in fact he found the same "metaphysical subject" as Wittgenstein.

The subject-world relationship is what exists. This relationship got its concrete existence as a totality, so that none of its components was "first". But the essence of this totality is the being of the subject, and the being of matter in the universe cannot be conceived without it. The being of matter in itself is an unjustified presupposition of materialism. What would the universe without subjects be like? As I said, you cannot imagine it without being yourself in the picture imagined.

Materialism presupposes something, and this something is the being of matter.
I also presuppose something, and this something is the subject's relationship with matter and other subjects.

Now we have two competing presuppositions, and we cannot prove either of them to be true, only try to make sense of both and then decide which one is more plausible.

Materialism cannot answer the question of why matter exists. There is no way of seeing the being of matter as causa sui. Its being has to be accepted as given and without any reason of being.

The being of the subject can be seen as causa sui, because we cannot eliminate ourselves from existence. And because the being of the subject is not possible without the being of matter, also the being of matter becomes necessary. So I would say that my presupposition is more reasonable.

This way of seeing our ontological situation also answers the question of what consciousness is. It is the subjective side of the subject's relationship with the material world, and its objective side is the subject's body, being itself part of the material world.

All kinds of things happened prior to the being of any subject in the physical spacetime, but it did not happen independent of the being of any subject at all, anywhere, any time in the universe. It could only happen in such a universe where there are conscious beings. And other kinds of universes are not possible universes.

The paradox of something happening prior to the being of subjects and its impossibility of happening without the being of subjects can only be solved by concluding that there must necessarily be subjects in the universe.

I am not claiming that this is the only possible universe although this may be the case. I claim that a universe where flying unicorns are a usual sight is a possible universe, but a universe without subjects is not possible, if we speak of an alternate universe, so that this universe does not exist but the alternate universe exists instead. Because I claim that the subject-world relationship is the "Archimedean point" of reality, a universe without subjects does not fit into the logical space defined by this basic ontological structure. Ontology precedes logic in this sense.

The nonexistence of the subjectless world is something else than the nonexistence of an object in the world. Its nonexistence is based on the lack of experiences which makes it absolute nothingness, and therefore impossible. If you try to posit its possibility as actual reality, it immediately loses its possible existence, and it remains an abstraction with an internal inconsistency. The world without subjects would be nonexistent as a whole, whatever properties you imagine it contains. And therefore its existence is impossible.

An example of a chain of intuitions:

Imagine you do not exist. What would there be? Nothing.

But now I can say that I exist, and there is obviously something. There is nothing only for you.

Then I can imagine that I do not exist either. And that there is no one existing who can say there is something.

Now there is absolutely nothing, and I cannot appeal to anyone arguing against it.

To say that there is still the material world without subjects has no rational justification. It is a presupposition hanging in the air.

This is what I call the intuition of nothingness. It cannot be described with words in spite of the effort above, but it can be seen very clearly, and the conclusion of this chain of intuitions can be expressed with this unambiguous phrase: Without subjects there is nothing.

My thoughts go along the same paths as Wittgenstein's. The world is everything that is the case. The world consists of facts. But the facts of the world can be different from the facts of our world. What kind of facts there can be defines the logical space of the world. It defines the totality of possible worlds. But the being of the subject is the ontological precondition for the being of the world. The world is “my world”. The world and the subject are what Wittgenstein calls the “two godheads”, and this is also what I call the subject-world relationship. Now I agree with Wittgenstein also on what he says of logic and the world: logic precedes the facts of the world, the “how”, but not the being of the world, the “what”. All this means that a world without subjects is not a possible world, it does not fit into the logical space of possible worlds.

If there were nothing, there would be no one to say anything about anything.

If there were something but no one to say anything about anything, how could there be any rational justification to say that something exists or even that something possibly exists?

What is the relationship between logic and the existence of the world? Is there logic outside of its use?

Just a few simple questions.

My view is that eternity means time without an end. Being is eternal, and time is the "nucleus" of being as Heidegger suggests in the last paragraph of Being and Time.

So time is the key component of the internal structure of existence, and timelessness only means ignoring the past and the future.

I say time is the succession of presents. Time can be experienced as the eternal present, but nevertheless there is always the next present, and the next, and so on until there perhaps is no next present, or then there is always the next present. This is what I think time is. It does not depend on whether we care or not. We are all in the same boat here.

I am speaking of subjective time and its phenomenology. It has nothing to do with measuring or classifying, and it has the phenomenological structure of "the lived anticipation of the future from the past". In spite of this, we have our next moment, next presence, and if there is no next presence, time ends. It is our existential situation, and something else than saying that the world goes on without us. Internal and external descriptions of existence are perhaps incompatible, and I think that the way science describes reality is in the end secondary and has little to do with what really matters.

Kierkegaard had his leap of faith, but how can we reach this peace and balance? The "next" is always there, and we do not know what it is. But then, perhaps we need not know. When the "next" comes, let it come. Faith without God. Pure faith. Is this our religion?

What does existence mean?

I can think of a world where you do not exist. That is easy.

You can probably think of a world where I do not exist. No problem.

But can you think of a world where you do not exist? If you can, that is fine.

I cannot think of a world where I do not exist. How could I? What does the existence of such a world mean to me now as I exist? I can only think clearly about things with clear meanings. In my early days when I did not understand what nothingness means, I superficially thought that a world without my existence is possible, but now I see clearly: if I did not exist, there would be nothing, and therefore I can only exist. There is no escape from existence. And this is true for all of us. My metaphysics follows from this insight.

Now I want to ask: if you can think of a world where you do not exist, and I cannot think of a world where I do not exist, what explains our difference in understanding existence? Are our brains so different? Have I somehow lost my ability to think logically?

By 'you' I mean anyone reading this.

There is only a small step from the intuition of my nonexistence to the intuition of nothingness. And nothingness cannot be consistently thought of, it is without concrete meaning and self-contradictory.

This is, of course, paradoxical, and leads to some metaphysical conclusions.

You are not part of the world in the same way as a stone is part of the world. Your being in the world is an ontological relationship. You are in the world, and your being is as essential for the being of the world as the being of the world is for your being.

You cannot just look at the moon and imagine that a world without you might be something like that. You cannot eliminate yourself from the world, not even in your imagination. If you try, you see absolute nothingness. The absurdity of non-being.

Or that is what I see. Perhaps you see something else. But we must look close enough.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

'Something' is a word. 'Nothing' is a word. A word has a denotation and a meaning. In this context we can say that 'something' denotes the world as it objectively exists, and the meaning of 'something' is the way the world appears to the subject. But also the denotation of 'something', the world in itself, in its being, depends on the being of the subject. So we can say that something exists as long as the subject exists, and there is nothing if and only if there are no subjects. And because the being of the subject is causa sui, which means that its being follows from its essence, there is necessarily something.

'Nothing' denotes nothing, and its meaning is paradoxical, contradicting itself immediately as it is thought of or expressed. Nevertheless, it can be an object of intuition.

If you have an intuition of your own nonexistence, you have an intuition of nothingness. There is no world in that intuition, no Big Bang, no cosmic evolution, no biological evolution, no human civilization, no community of subjects, no others. Just absolute nothingness, pure and simple. This is what nothingness would be if it were possible. But it is not. And therefore nothingness can be defined as the absence of a subjective perspective of any kind.

If we think of the universe as a spatiotemporal totality, as I do, and as modern physics does, it is not difficult to think that the existence of the universe depends on the existence of subjects, so that the very being of the universe is based on the being of subjectivity. Time is only one dimension of this totality. The uninhabited past of the universe is in relation to the inhabited present, to us, whoever or whatever we happen to be. We do not know any other kind of being if we think of the universe as a whole, as a holistic structure. And there is no rational justification for extrapolating our thinking outside of this world of subjects. It would be an uninhabited alternate universe instead of this universe we live in, a universe without any subjective perspective, and to me that is an absurd thought, a thought that tries to eliminate itself out of being. So there is necessarily someone or something looking at the world if there is a world at all. This is the idea of the subject-world relationship being fundamental for all being, so that without it there can be nothing and everything that happens, happens within that relationship. This is why I have called it the Archimedean point of reality.

My view is that the being of the world without the being of some subjective perspective is impossible. And I know intuitively that it must be so.

We must separate how the world appears to the subject and that there is a world at all, and also the latter depends on the being of subjectivity. For me this is obvious, but not for all, of which I am surprised.

And of course this has nothing to do with solipsism. The world is a community of subjects, and my personal nonexistence does not end the world. Only if there is no one, has never been anyone and will never be anyone, only in that case, which is in itself impossible, there would be absolutely nothing. And that nothingness, if it were possible, would have nothing to do with anything that physically happens to the physical world. This is a paradox, and it is solved by concluding that there must necessarily be a subjective perspective to the world for there being a world.

My view is a combination of epistemological realism and ontological idealism or subjectivism. The question of solipsism is interesting, but it has nothing to do with these considerations except for the metaphysical consequences of them.

The problem with materialism is that it makes unjustified assumptions and commitments. We cannot eliminate the being of the subject from the knowing of the world, but because we see matter everywhere, we draw the false conclusion that matter is everything there is, or at least everything can be reduced to matter, and that the being of matter does not depend on the being of the subject. This is an epistemic leap that has no rational justification. What materialism tries to say is that our own being can be explained by the being of our objects, in the sense of noumena, which are independent of our knowledge of them, in the Kantian sense. Here we have two intuitions in conflict: the intuition of materialism that matter is everything, and the intuition that the being of the subject cannot be eliminated. The first intuition appeals to transcendence, because matter in itself is transcendent, and the second intuition remains within the scope of immanence and argues that we cannot make a leap out of it into ontological transcendence. Because a world without subjects would be precisely that: transcendence without immanence, and this would mean absolute nothingness if it were possible. But nothingness is not possible, and therefore there is necessarily some kind of a subjective perspective to the world if we think of the world as a spatiotemporal totality.

There are surely many definitions of materialism, but the main point of our discussion is whether the being of the world is independent of the being of the subjective perspective to the world. If consciousness is an emergent property of matter or if the mind is identical with the brain does not change this basic ontological question.

I think all the versions of materialism I know of make the unjustified assumption that there is matter in itself, independent of the being of subjectivity, which to me is pure transcendence without immanence, and I cannot consistently conceive of something like that. It is the question of a possible universe without subjects, the dividing line between materialism and the sort of idealism or subjectivism that I represent.

I have not said anywhere that objects do no exist independent of our direct observations of them. I have said that their being is not independent of the being of subjects. These are totally different things.

I think there are many implicit assumptions we are not aware of which are based on intuitions, and some of those intuitions may be too superficial, as though they were left half-way. One of those superficial intuitions is the possibility of the universe without subjects.

As human beings we have existential questions of being and non-being, finitude and eternity and so on. And as human beings we are amazingly curious about what this is all about. So am I. And philosophy, as I see it, tries to clarify these questions, and tries to find a language that can express something about them.

Because the being of experiential states needs a material basis, the physical evolution precedes those experiential states in physical time, but what really happens is the evolution of consciousness, not matter in itself which would produce consciousness as a kind of side effect or accident.

The subject cannot exist without its physical body. Therefore we have the material world.