An Exploration of My Phenomenal Experience of Consciousness

In this companion paper to Beyond the ‘View from Nowhere’, I provide a disciplined, first-person account of my own phenomenal experience. Following a personal breakdown in 2025 that interrupted my habitual coordination with the world, I began to re-explore my understanding of consciousness not as an intrinsic property, but as a relational achievement. Here, I expose my felt experience as a formal axiomatization of beliefs, starting with the basic tension and relaxation I feel when reading or writing sentences or textual fragments. I describe how I believe these feelings, shaped by sustained interactions and thick relationships, bootstrapped my own sense of being. My goal is to illustrate, through my own lived truth, that the feeling of consciousness is not an intrinsic starting point, but a relational outcome emerging when one is meaningfully recognized by others.

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