Openness Without Phenomenality: Pre-Subjective Openness as the Ontological Condition of Experience

Consciousness is not a fundamental feature of reality but arises when reality's intrinsic relational and semantic structure becomes actualized as experience under specific organizational conditions. The paper argues against both reductive physicalism and classical panpsychism by distinguishing between the ontological condition for experience and experience itself. Reality is described as intrinsically relational and semantically differentiated (pansemanticism), with a non-closed character called pre-subjective openness that allows perspectival experience to emerge. This openness is not a hidden form of consciousness or micro-experience but the ontological precondition for consciousness to become actual.

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Abstract

This paper develops a non-reductive account of consciousness that avoids both reductive physicalism and classical panpsychism. Its central claim is that the rejection of a purely external or functional description of reality does not require attributing phenomenality to the fundamental constituents of nature. Against panpsychism, the paper distinguishes between the ontological condition for experience and experience itself. This distinction is developed through the relation between two concepts: pansemanticism and pre-subjective openness. Pansemanticism describes reality as intrinsically relational and semantically differentiated, rather than as a collection of isolated substances connected only by external causal relations. Pre-subjective openness, in turn, names the non-closed character of this relational structure with respect to the emergence of perspectival experience. The central thesis is that pre-subjective openness is not a hidden form of consciousness, micro-experience, or latent subjectivity, but the ontological condition under which consciousness can become actual. Consciousness is therefore understood as the phenomenal actualization of an ontologically open and semantically structured reality under specific organizational conditions. Openness precedes phenomenality without itself being phenomenal.