From Phenomenal Facts to Primitive Qualia: Auditing Metaphysical Promotion

Abstract

This paper examines what the existence and character of phenomenal experience establish about its metaphysical status. It does not deny phenomenal consciousness, qualitative difference, unity, immediacy, ineffability, or first-person access. Its target is the stronger claim that phenomenal character is metaphysically primitive. The paper distinguishes two principal, potentially interacting routes to this claim: phenomenological promotion, in which features of experience are used to support claims about metaphysical constitution or primitive status, and theoretical positing, in which primitive phenomenality is introduced as part of a broader explanatory or metaphysical theory. Across these routes, three non-exclusive mechanisms of metaphysical promotion are identified: register transfer, candidate selection, and warrant-strength escalation. The framework provides operational criteria for distinguishing these mechanisms and specifies mechanism-relative requirements for justificatory bridge adequacy. Revelation serves as the central register-transfer case; grounding-physicalist responses illustrate candidate selection; and the transition from fundamentality to metaphysical finality illustrates warrant-strength escalation. The analysis also considers phenomenal unity, Mary-style knowledge arguments, inverted spectra, explanatory gaps, the hard problem, and the distinction between explanatory stopping points, fundamentality, and modal finality. The resulting audit is source-preserving: failure of a metaphysical promotion does not by itself defeat the phenomenal, epistemic, explanatory, or comparative claim from which it begins. The central contribution is a typed framework for delimiting argumentative reach—identifying what a source claim establishes, what stronger conclusion is being added, and what further justification is required for that promotion to succeed.