Autophany: A Derived Foundation for Panprotopsychism

Panprotopsychism is the most promising escape from the deadlock between panpsychism, which makes experience fundamental and owes the combination problem, and naturalism, which makes it structural and owes the hard problem. Its strategy is to posit an intrinsic, actual base beneath structure—protophenomenal qualities, instantiated but unfelt—whose configuration is meant to constitute experience. But it cannot say why such qualities exist; they are built in only to plug the gap left by starting from consciousness. This paper reverses the order and derives the base instead. From a recent result that absolute nothingness is not an admissible alternative to being, and an argument that possibility is the modal profile of what is actual, it reaches one primitive with two inseparable aspects: a Structural Aspect, which physics maps, and an Actual Aspect—its obtaining, reached by modal argument, not posited as a quality to explain mind—which is what distinguishes the account. With actuality secured independently of consciousness, special qualities become unnecessary: qualities are inevitably structural, and no description, however richly specified, entails that what it describes is felt. Phenomenality has more in common with actuality than with structure, so the explanatory roles swap. Manifestation is actuality actual to itself; felt presence is the reflexive self-appearing—autophany—of an otherwise dark actuality, a contingent organization of the actual, not a fundamental feature of reality. The keystone is a modal asymmetry—givenness alone cannot be merely possible—locating the manifesting work in actuality, not description, and yielding a proposed solution to the hard problem.