The “Hard Problem” of Consciousness and Cosmology: the Saturated Phenomenality of the Universe versus its Constituted Objectivity

The paper discusses the relevance of cosmological ideas to the explication of the so called “Hard problem of consciousness.” The latter problem is reminiscent to the ambivalent position of man in being called the paradox of subjectivity. The rational capabilities allow the person to start from its position and contemplate the whole of existence from the smallest conceivable scale to the largest as the whole of creation itself. Life gives the person a discrete particularity; but from that position the person can direct its intentionality toward the whole of existence. The object of consciousness embraces the universe at its extremes of greatness and smallness as a continuous surface which amounts to “uroboros,” the mythic serpent biting its tail. Thus the universe is not a flat extension of time and space, but an uroboros-like structure determined by the world line of the subject. Essential to man’s hypostatic particularity is the material body. The relationship of “I=I” in the subject, and then in its existence in the world is a saturated experience that transcends the subject-object relation and provides the ground for consciousness in its relation to the world. The universe is present in the human condition as a saturated phenomenon inseparable from the existence of the human. It is this phenomenon, to the extent that it cannot be articulated in terms of quantity, quality, modality and relation, that constitutes the “I” in its ambivalent condition of being the center of disclosure and manifestation of the universe and, at the same time, an insignificant organic component of it. The “hard” problem of consciousness as the split in the experience of existence into 1st and 3rd person reflects this paradoxical position of man and requires its elucidation through an open-ended hermeneutics that is similar to that for the universe as a saturated phenomenon. Hence the hard problem can be seen through its endless hermeneutics not as a problem, but as that which incessantly explicates the sense of human existence as given