What Consciousness Is: Experiencing as the Primary Datum

This paper establishes consciousness as identical with experiencing itself, not as a thing that has experiences or a substance that undergoes experiences. This identification dissolves multiple persistent problems in philosophy of mind: the homunculus problem (no experiencer behind experiencing), the incoherence of "unconscious experience" (parallel to "unthought thinking"), the mystery of the subconscious (merely changes not registered in present experience), and the hard problem of consciousness (no gap between process and experience when they're identical). Building on Experiential Empiricism's treatment of time as experiential limitation rather than metaphysical dimension, we demonstrate that all existence is present experiencing. Past exists only as present memory-experience; future exists only as present anticipation-experience. What we call "unconscious" past experiences are not experiences that occurred without consciousness but absences detectable only by their effects on present experiencing, analogous to detecting a void by what surrounds it.