In Phenomena, I advance my phenomenology.

The philosophy I lay out here forms the bedrock of my ontology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, aesthetics, epistemology, values and account of the meaning of life. It is my belief that readers will find in it pleasure, satisfaction, revelation and transformation.

The Phenomenal World

Much can be learned about human nature and life as we know it from a careful exploration of the phenomenal world. Take the following three basic features of phenomenality: qualities, polydigms and attentionality.

Humans experience upwards of 40 distinct sensory qualities, which I classify, tentatively, as hologenic (of the entire), endogenic (of the inner), somagenic (of the body) and exogenic (of the outer).

Exogenic qualities, such as colour and sound, ‘show up’ as experience of the outside world, while endogenic qualities, such as emotion and understanding, show up as experience of the inner world (strictly, if you like, things going on in the brain). Somagenic qualities, like hunger and momentum, show up as experience of the body, while hologenic senses, like spatial and temporal relation, appear throughout the entire phenomenal world. Other qualities include morality, volition, significance, value, numericity and, er, quality!

Although each quality is unique and irreducible to any other quality, they share some curious features. One such feature is that they show up together to form polydigms. ‘Polydigm’ is my word for a phenomenal thing, in the broadest sense of the word (such that thoughts or feelings are things as well as fingers and raindrops), that is, strictly, an experience-thing.

‘Poly’, here, means ‘many’, and ‘digm’ means ‘face’. A polydigm, then, is a many-faced thing. Take a so-called physical object, say, an apple. As it shows up in experience, the apple’s colour, its greenness, exists together with its form, size, weight, smoothness, and ‘appliness’. All these distinctive qualities co-exist, come together, at the same point in space time to make, or be, the experience-apple. It is a single object with many co-existing faces (qualities), none reducible to any other. More, a polydigm is nothing other than its qualities, nothing other than the assembly of its faces.

The entirety of the phenomenal world is made of nested polydigms, from a base level of simple qualities to the totality of the omnidigm, (the totality of all polydigms that make up a phenomenal world).

All polydigms, and therefore the phenomenal world itself, is attentional. Everything in my world is oriented toward my attention, (or has an attentional form) and everything in yours is likewise pointed towards you. 

These are just a phew of so many phascinating pheatures of phenomenality.

I know this all sounds a bit weird – that’s because it is, even though our experience world is the very thing that we’re most familiar with!

But through an intimate exploration of phenomenality we come face-to-face with all of life’s most enduring mysteries: the meaning of life and love, free will, right and wrong, pleasure and pain, truth, value, space and time, and the nature of consciousness (that is, us).

All of these and more, I explore in Phenomena. (That’s probably why it’s taking me so long to write the damn thing!)