From Identity and Intentionality to a Metaphysics of Consciousness

The precise relationship between reality and our consciousness is a philo-sophical question that has been deemed to be of the utmost importance. While the answer may never be known, attempting to answer it defines who we are as humans. The never-ending endeavor to answer this question is tied to the individual and collective quest for meaning, expressed in the sisyphic attempt to understand who we are. It could be argued that this is the distinctive essence of sentient beings. From a metaphysical position, this paper presents a component of the inevitable quest to attempt to understand who we are and explain the nature of our relationship to our perceived reality. More specifically, this paper puts forth a metaphysical paradigm that offers a renewed perspective of the nature of consciousness and its relation to reality. The arguments that will be outlined rely on phenomenology, the denial of which is akin to a ‘self-denial’ similar to Cotard’s syndrome. The paper will begin by establishing our understanding of the fundamental elements that establish the relationship between consciousness and reality, and continue by unpacking the laws of ‘identity’, ‘intentionality’, and the classification of the mechanisms of knowledge acquisition. This investigation will demonstrate the possibility of a transcendental mechanism of consciousness based on the logical and phenomenological possibility that nothingness is capable of containing every possible thing. We will then present a mathematical model, Soft Logic, of that transcendental mechanism of consciousness and conclude by outlining a psychological implication.