A working hypothesis about felt truth
Why does nonduality become Brahman for some—and emptiness for others?
Some people experience qualia or bare awareness as the one fact that cannot be explained away. I do not. When experience becomes quiet, I find no luminous remainder: consciousness arises with its object, and both are conditioned.
For some, awareness is directly present, irreducible and more certain than anything appearing within it. Denying its independent reality can seem like denying experience itself.
Seeing red is real, but no second object called intrinsic redness appears beside the seeing. When subject and object quiet down, I do not find an observer left underneath them.
The force of an experience can vary separately from its content.
Salience is the assignment of relevance or felt significance. Here, phenomenological salience means how strongly awareness or a phenomenal feature stands out and seems to carry evidential force.
Ordinary things can become charged with meaning.
Phantoms in the Brain describes some people with temporal-lobe epilepsy attributing extraordinary significance to ordinary events. Ramachandran proposed an altered emotional-salience landscape. His small physiological test suggested selective amplification—especially for religious material—not equal importance for everything. The broader syndrome remains disputed.
An irrelevant Aha can make a claim seem truer.
Laukkonen and colleagues found that an incidental Aha experience raised truth ratings for a simultaneous worldview statement. Related semantic-priming experiments elicited false insights for incorrect solutions. Aha and salience are not identical; the result shows that felt force can leak into a truth judgment without adding evidence.
Prediction: matched contemplative states should receive different interpretations when phenomenological salience, prior training or reification tendency changes. No study has tested this complete comparison.
Model
Refined attention changes what stands out.
Ordinary experience hides its construction. A world appears over there; a subject seems to receive it from in here. Refined attention can weaken that arrangement. Boundaries soften. Ownership and agency become less automatic. Awareness may become unusually vivid.
If awareness dominates the field and seems stable across changing content, a consciousness-first interpretation becomes likely. If awareness remains one conditioned feature among changing features, an emptiness interpretation becomes likely.
Ordinary mind
Subject and object arrive already packaged.
Refined attention
Construction becomes visible. Salience can rise as boundaries loosen.
HIGH SALIENCE OF AWARENESS
Brahman-like reading
Content changes while awareness seems continuous, uncaused and more certain than its contents. Awareness is inferred to be fundamental.
LOWER OR DISTRIBUTED SALIENCE
Emptiness-like reading
No single feature dominates. Awareness, observer and object vary with attention, body, context and training. None is inferred to be fundamental.
This is one proposed route. High-salience emptiness remains possible when awareness is vivid but not reified; the 2×2 below keeps that case visible.
Observed state × inference
Phenomenological salience and reification are independent.
A state can be vivid without being treated as fundamental. A fundamental entity can also be inferred from theory without a vivid state.
HIGH S · LOW R
Luminous emptiness
Seen: awareness, sensation and change are exceptionally vivid. Each varies when attention, breath, posture or context changes; no invariant observer is found.
Example: body boundaries disappear, but the state develops, stabilizes and ends under identifiable conditions.
HIGH S · HIGH R
Luminous ground
Seen: thoughts and sensations change, while being aware seems continuous, unlocated and self-confirming.
Example: thought stops; bare presence fills the field and is interpreted as universal awareness rather than a state of this organism.
LOW S · LOW R
Functional–relational
Seen: seeing red consists of a system responding, discriminating, remembering and acting in a particular way. No second object called “redness itself” appears alongside the seeing.
Example: change the light, adaptation, attention or neural state and the red experience changes with the system.
PRASANNA · near this edgeLOW S · HIGH R
Conceptual reification
Seen: no unusual state is required. The fundamental entity is supplied by an argument, scripture or thought experiment.
Example: the conceivability of a philosophical zombie is taken to show that intrinsic qualia must exist separately from function.
Prasanna is placed near the lower-left box. This means awareness has moderate rather than minimal phenomenological force; it does not mean experience is weak or globally low-salience.
Relative coordinates
Add one axis: what does the view treat as basic?
The gold sheet is the middle-way plane. Neither physical structure nor awareness receives intrinsic priority. Things still exist and have effects, but through causes, conditions, parts, contrasts and descriptions.
Map I · Philosophies
Drag to rotate · scroll or pinch to zoom · click a point for its model and coordinates
Prasanna — current position
Causally rich reality without intrinsic foundations: Yogācāra as a disciplined account of how a subject constructs a world; Madhyamaka as the refusal to turn subject, object, relation, or emptiness into bedrock.
Experience supplies evidence, but does not decide the ontology by itself.
What appears is treated as conditioned; no feature is made self-existing.
Neither physical structure nor awareness receives intrinsic priority.
Click a point or use Inspect. Coordinates are relative, not measurements. For a philosophy, phenomenological salience means how much evidential weight the view usually gives to the apparent givenness of experience.
Map II · Thinkers and contemplatives
For people, coordinates summarize published work and teaching. Salience means how much weight that work gives to lived experience; it is not a claim about private experience.
Drag to rotate · scroll or pinch to zoom · click a point for its model and coordinates
Jay Garfield
A contemporary Madhyamaka reading that takes conventional reality seriously while denying an ultimate ontological ground.
Published work uses experience as evidence, but not as a final authority.
What appears is treated as conditioned; no feature is made self-existing.
Neither physical structure nor awareness receives intrinsic priority.
Patterns in the placement
What the map shows
Advaita and luminous Madhyamaka can both involve intense nondual states. They separate mainly on reification and what is treated as fundamental.
Madhyamaka, neutral monism and dual-aspect monism can sit near F = 0. Madhyamaka refuses a base substance; the others may posit neutral or dual-aspect stuff.
A theory may give experience little authority while treating matter, laws or structure as intrinsically real. Low salience is not the same as low reification.
The position combines a subject-side account of construction with a middle-plane ontology and a naturalistic account of causal organization.
Two jobs, not two substances
Yogācāra phenomenology and Madhyamaka
It studies attention, concepts, memory, habit and projection from the side of experience. Example: the same sound becomes threat, music or background depending on learned categories and current attention.
It applies dependent analysis to object, subject, consciousness, causation and emptiness itself. The answer is no independent core—not no existence.
Combined: Yogācāra models the construction of the interface. Madhyamaka says neither the interface, its user, nor the territory behind it is self-grounding.
Current coordinates
Prasanna: moderate phenomenological salience, low reification, middle plane.
“Causes and conditions all the way down” describes the position, with one change: there is no final layer at which dependence stops. Reality exists, has structure and makes causal differences without containing a self-grounding unit.
The functional claim is broad. Fix every causally relevant feature—neural, vascular, biochemical, embodied, environmental, analog, continuous and possibly non-Turing-computable—and there is no additional variable called the quale that can change on its own.
Reality is not reduced to a mental representation. Yogācāra describes how a subject constructs an experienced world. Madhyamaka applies dependent analysis to the subject, its representations, the world, causation and emptiness.
Closest cluster
Madhyamaka · non-idealist Yogācāra · enactivism · process-relational naturalism · broad dynamical functionalism
Update rule
A strong experience changes the salience coordinate. It changes ontology only when there is independent reason to treat the experience as evidence of an intrinsic property.
Empty does not mean absent. It means nothing carries its own existence alone.
Update table
If this happens, move the marker here.
An observation first updates the model that predicted it. FTL signalling updates physics. Verified information without a functioning brain updates the dependence of memory on one brain. A move on the fundamental axis requires evidence that distinguishes physical organization, consciousness-first models and dualism.
| If this happens | Move toward | Direction | Concrete implication |
|---|---|---|---|
| A person retains specific memories through a period in which the brain’s relevant causal organization is completely and verifiably absent. | Survival theory or substance dualism | + dual | Example: information learned only during that period is later reported and independently verified. Personal continuity would no longer track one functioning brain. |
| The same conscious capacities appear in very different materials whenever the same complete causal organization is built. | Broad functionalism | − structural | Example: a biological brain replacement and a nonbiological system preserve the same reports, discriminations, learning and internal state relations across every test. |
| Experience depends on biological dynamics that a discrete computation does not preserve. | Dynamical naturalism or enactivism | − near plane | Example: two systems run the same computation, but consciousness changes only with a continuous biochemical oscillation or body–environment feedback loop. |
| A new physical variable changes experience while ordinary neural firing and behavior are held fixed. | Russellian monism or panpsychism | + consciousness | Example: varying a newly measured property Q changes reported brightness in awake subjects without changing known neural dynamics; Q then predicts simple experiential differences in other systems. |
| One causal-integration measure predicts consciousness in brains, patients and machines—including cases where behavior misleads us. | Intrinsic causal realism; possibly panpsychism | + consciousness | Example: the measure detects covert awareness in an unresponsive patient, tracks loss and return under anesthesia, and predicts experience in a small recurrent chip but not a much larger feed-forward network. |
| A physical model predicts every report and discrimination about experience, and an extra intrinsic quale changes no result. | Reductive physicalism or illusionism | − physical | Example: the model predicts exactly when a color will look different, when a subject will insist it is ineffable, and how an intervention changes both—with no leftover predictive variable. |
| Awareness becomes stable, dominant and apparently unchanged across all content; dependent analysis never reveals a condition for it. | Advaita-like idealism | + consciousness | This would strongly change Prasanna’s first-person evidence. It would motivate Brahman, although the experience alone would not establish a universal consciousness. |
| Matched contemplative states receive different metaphysical labels depending on prior training. | Yogācāra phenomenology; remain on the middle plane | stay on plane | Example: blinded reports show similar loss of self-boundary, but Advaita training predicts “Brahman” and Buddhist training predicts “emptiness.” Interpretation would be partly constructed downstream. |
| FTL signals, future prediction or past-life information replicate under strong controls. | New physics first; dualism only if the effect is specifically mental | conditional | FTL alone revises spacetime. Future prediction may imply retrocausality. Past-life data may imply unknown information transfer. A move toward dualism needs an effect tied to minds and not accounted for by the revised physics. |
The hard limit
Madhyamaka does not predict that a particular particle, field or mental capacity cannot exist. A new particle, an FTL signal or a verified past-life memory can still depend on conditions. Such results can falsify current physics or functionalism without falsifying emptiness.
Experiments detect relations: changing X changes a detector, report or behavior Y. An intrinsic property is supposed to be what X is independently of every relation. If it affects Y, it has entered a relation we can model; if it affects nothing, an experiment cannot detect it. Category theory uses a similar working stance: characterize an object by the morphisms that connect and transform it. This does not prove Madhyamaka. It explains why empirical evidence naturally describes dependencies.
Future work
Turn the map into an instrument.
An interactive questionnaire could separate four things that ordinary “what philosophy are you?” quizzes collapse: what one experiences, how strongly it presents itself, what inferential authority one grants it, and what evidence one would accept against one’s current view.
Output: a point with uncertainty bands, nearby views, and the answers that most strongly determined the placement.
Appendix
The philosophy table behind the map.
Numbers are relative: they expose the placement judgment and create one view of the terrain.
| View | S | R | F | Placement note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prasanna — current positionMiddle way | 3.8 | 1.8 | 0 | Causally rich reality without intrinsic foundations: Yogācāra as a disciplined account of how a subject constructs a world; Madhyamaka as the refusal to turn subject, object, relation, or emptiness into bedrock. |
| MadhyamakaMiddle way | 6.7 | 0.8 | 0 | Phenomena exist dependently and conventionally; none has intrinsic nature. Emptiness is not another substance behind appearances. |
| Yogācāra phenomenologyMiddle way | 6.2 | 1.7 | +0.3 | A subject-side analysis of construction, projection and the experienced subject–object split, read without turning consciousness into a substance. |
| Advaita VedāntaConsciousness | 9.1 | 8.8 | +9.5 | Nondual awareness is taken not only as phenomenologically decisive but as disclosure of the fundamental reality: Brahman. |
| Yogācāra (idealist reading)Consciousness | 6.8 | 7 | +8 | A stronger mind-only reading in which consciousness is given ontological priority over external objects. |
| Analytic idealismConsciousness | 5.3 | 8.3 | +9.2 | Mind is the basic category; individual minds are localizations or partitions within a broader mental reality. |
| PanpsychismConsciousness | 4.7 | 7.2 | +6.8 | Experiential or proto-experiential nature is treated as ubiquitous and basic rather than produced from wholly nonexperiential matter. |
| CosmopsychismConsciousness | 5.8 | 8 | +8.2 | The cosmos as a whole is the fundamental conscious subject; local minds derive from it. |
| Dual-aspect monismDual | 5.1 | 5.4 | +0.8 | Mental and physical descriptions are two aspects of one underlying reality, neither reducible to the other. |
| Russellian monismDual | 3.7 | 6 | +1.9 | Physics gives relational structure; consciousness may reveal something about the intrinsic nature that realizes that structure. |
| Neutral monismRelational | 3.9 | 4.2 | +0.2 | Mental and physical are constructions from elements that are, in themselves, neither mental nor physical. |
| Process philosophyRelational | 5 | 3.5 | +0.1 | Events, relations and becoming have priority over enduring substances. |
| EnactivismRelational | 4.4 | 2.7 | -2.2 | Mind is enacted through organism–environment coupling, embodiment, action and sense-making. |
| Embodied / dynamical functionalismPhysical | 2.8 | 2.5 | -5.8 | Experience depends on the whole causally relevant organization, potentially including analog, biochemical, embodied and continuous dynamics. |
| Computational functionalismPhysical | 1.9 | 3.2 | -7.7 | The right computational or causal role is sufficient for mentality, independently of the material implementing it. |
| Nonreductive physicalismPhysical | 3 | 4.2 | -6.4 | Mental properties depend on the physical while retaining explanatory autonomy. |
| Reductive physicalismPhysical | 1.7 | 5.2 | -9 | Mental facts are identical with, or fully reducible to, physical facts. |
| Illusionism about phenomenal propertiesPhysical | 1 | 1.5 | -9.2 | We misrepresent ourselves as having private, intrinsic phenomenal properties; explaining that disposition is the target. |
| Property dualismDual | 5.4 | 8.7 | +4.4 | Mental properties are fundamental and irreducible even if there is only one kind of substance. |
| Substance dualismDual | 4.8 | 9.2 | +5 | Mind and matter are distinct fundamental substances or kinds of entity. |
| MysterianismUncertain | 4.1 | 3.8 | -0.6 | Human cognitive limits may prevent us from understanding how consciousness fits into nature. |
Relevant observations
Measured components of the model.
Current studies separately measure default-network activity, attentional effort, intrinsic–extrinsic network coordination, interoceptive salience and self-boundary. The proposed Brahman–emptiness comparison has not been run.
- Brewer et al. (2011)Meditation experience and default-mode activity/connectivity.
- Garrison et al. (2013)Posterior cingulate activity and reports of effortless awareness.
- Josipovic et al. (2012)Nondual practice and relations between intrinsic and extrinsic networks.
- Nave et al. (2021)A phenomenological investigation of meditative self-boundary dissolution.
- Lindahl et al. (2017)Similar contemplative phenomena can receive sharply different interpretations and appraisals.
- Ramachandran (2001)Temporal-lobe epilepsy, altered emotional significance and the proposed “salience landscape.”
- Duman et al. (2021)Why Geschwind syndrome and its association with temporal-lobe epilepsy remain controversial.
- Laukkonen et al. (2020)Artificially induced Aha moments made accompanying facts feel more true.
- Laukkonen et al. (2022)Incidental Aha moments increased the perceived truth of simultaneous worldview claims.
- Grimmer et al. (2022)Semantic priming elicited false insights for incorrect anagram solutions.