What is referred to as qualia if they mean anything at all are only in the immediate subjective present, are the root of the tree of everything understood as qualia. What is that root? It can't be a concept because the whole point was to empty out the conceptual contents, and it seems it cannot also be a quale because how is it then distinguished from the representatives of qualia which form the tree, or the essence of any particular quale. It's an old philosophical conundrum, distinguishing say essence from existence. Is there something in experience that irreducibly marks existence or being? It is in other words the question of being, the ontological distinction in fact, but wrapped up in all sorts of cognitivist blankets. It makes more sense to accept that the distinction itself, the very seed or root of that distinction contaminates all our thinking, and marks a wrong turning in the history of metaphysics, and so cannot be 'cured' by any further thinking along received lines.

To hear a note or see a coloured shape, the note has its place in a piece of music or is perhaps a birdsong, the coloured shape in a picture or a certain vista, but apart from their function is being part of some larger synthesis which is already more than half-way to being an idea, they also have a individual character, infinitely particular. That infinite particularity is such through its evocative potentialities, through the hints of character that it evokes, which can be felt as simultaneously personal and general, at least for those whose culture overlaps with yours. these evocative associations are structured say in a tree-like way, this association giving rise to that one etc., and spreading out in a synesthesia. in other words they can be resolved into 'tasting notes'. You could say that what makes a quale what it is is its tasting notes. So then is the quale anything more than those tasting notes? If not then doesn't it reduce to something which is ultimately not made of qualia at all. The tasting notes are a tree every node of which is a quale; the root of the tree is in immediate presence but the note are in re-presentation but otherwise they are not different. So you only need the tree and the immediacy of the root, which is itself a kind of quale, but of an existential kind, neutral to sense.

It's fully in line with the evolutionary origin of mind that it is always asking 'what is this?' - that is, classifying each new event according to its pre-existing schemes and modifying the latter whenever the degree of novelty exceeds some variable threshold. Further, such a mind at a sufficient level of sophistication has itself as an element in its schemes and hence experiences the event of its own awareness, the schemes always seeking as a matter of epistemological parsimony to draw out their internal implications as far as possible. Hence even a p-zombie would question its own existence in a self-conscious way. For example it would be subject to the effect of 'when I don't think about how I'm doing it (e.g. riding a bike) all is fine, but the minute I think about it, put attention onto how I am actually doing it, I can no longer do it as well, or at all.' This would be enough to make an experiential event of the mind's own experiencing. The p-zombie would presumably do all of this without any qualia, but it might speak of or think in terms of qualia just so as to have an appropriate language for taking this as a theme. Hence in a world of p-zombies we would find active philosophical discussion of qualia. How then could we tell that they 'really' didn't have them? How can we tell that we really do have them, outside of merely thinking about them?

Consciousness names the background by which every thing is as it is, what then is the background by which consciousness is as it is, or is able to do what it does? Call this the grounding problem. It is a blank or void in experience and just because of that it can become saturated with noetic value. This seems to a short circuit of knowing and being, but properly belongs only to knowing for which it represents new dimension requiring exploration.

Awareness of awareness is entirely dependent on a subordinate distinction made within awareness, therefore it is impossible. The only way you could be aware of awareness is through the direct and overwhelming conviction that you were not and could never be so aware.

The notion of causality is subject to a fourfold factoring: physical causality or the evolution of a dynamic system in time under deterministic rules; stimulus and response or the behaviour of vegetative life; goal-seeking motivation or behaviour of independently mobile creatures; and finally reasoned action, that is action responding to a comparative modeling of possible motives and outcomes. These are also levels of 'emergence'. Considering actions of all kinds as computations we might say that each level represents a higher Turing degree (in the sense of Degree Theory), that is it takes as primitive the outcomes of all computations of a complete class of computations at the lower level. What appears as the elusive phenomenon of freedom (of will) is the projection of the Turing 'jump'. Thus the current gropings towards the next level in trying to subsume the outcomes of all possible narrative frames, or motivations at the 'human' level. This would present an inceptional take on what is often seen as a collapse or ending of meanings, or a 'meaning crisis'.

While the objective is in space and time and the timeless, the subjective is only in time. While these two aspects of reality are interdependent their relation is such that the objective is in the subjective - even insofar as the subjective is also in the objective, as with intersubjectivity and reflexive intersubjectivity, this is for the subjective - which is strange because space and time seems to be far more complex than time by itself. There is no co-presence of the subjective which means that self-understanding by way of subjective structures never attains enough solidity to move beyond the fleeting present. The only counter for subjectivity is to build complex momentary experiences, which at most seem real or enduring. There needs to be a purely temporal route to thickening time, rather than just by mirroring spatial configuration.