Pinning down the realm of mind

Reading | Metaphysics

Ola Nilsson, MA | 2026-08-14

This essay constitutes the concluding part of my two previous essays, Meta-Survival: On the Incoherence of Localized, Countable Subjectivity and The Circle Dance of Personal Identity. In these essays, survival, personal identity, and time were discussed, among other things. However, one question has not yet been addressed: where does all of this take place?

In Meta-Survival, I argued that spatial separation is not sufficient to distinguish one particular experience from another: “two” identical systems located at different places in what we describe as space will give rise to a numerically identical experience (by “experience,” this essay refers to phenomenal consciousness, on the premise that no state can be conscious without being experienced). In The Circle Dance of Personal Identity, I argued, in a similar vein, that time could literally enter into a “loop,” and that time is fundamentally a subjective construction.

If experiences cannot be individuated through spatial separation, a central question arises: what role do spatial distinctions play in our experiences at all? A simple answer to this question—and the one I believe to be correct—is that space simply does not play a fundamental role in our experiences; rather, spatial distinctions merely constitute retrospective constructions. Space arises from more fundamental relationships, and the spatial therefore is not ontologically primary. In other words: experience does not require space in order to exist, but space does require experience in order to exist.

Yet, even if the spatial stage upon which our lives of experience appear to unfold is not fundamental, we will nevertheless still ask the question: where does all of this take place? I admit that the question immediately constitutes a category mistake, since it implies the assumption that experience must occur at an actual location. What I am asking for, in other words, are the coordinates of the coordinates! Nevertheless, we understand the question, and it lingers as critically unanswered and troubling. In this essay, I intend to point toward and make more concrete—though not in a spatial sense—what I have come to call the realm of mind.

What I refer to as the realm of mind is by no means something new. What is meant by this concept is something very similar—perhaps even identical—to ideas that have been addressed in countless traditions throughout history. The most well-known example is found in Plato’s world of Forms, which may be likened to a non-spatial domain in which forms exist independently of the physical world, and where the reality we experience constitutes only incomplete instances of these forms.

A more contemporary example is the idea of qualia spaces, which refers to a kind of field of experiential qualities within a multidimensional mathematical system of relations, one that does not necessarily require our three-dimensional space in order to be expressed (see, for example, Giulio Tononi’s work on Integrated Information Theory). Another contemporary example can be found within modern biology, where one speaks of Platonic spaces, referring to an abstract space containing a kind of blueprint of possible organic forms that the physical world may instantiate, but of which it is not directly a part (see, for example, the work of Michael Levin on morphogenetic fields).

What all of the descriptions above have in common, however, is that they inevitably lead the mind toward something spatial (worlds, spaces). What I am attempting to achieve with the concept of the realm of mind is to erase all spatial associations; for it is not a place we are heading toward.

In order to describe where we are heading, I will make use of an old and now outdated theory in cosmology: the Big Crunch scenario. According to the Big Crunch scenario, our universe will at some point cease to exist as the ongoing expansion of the universe is reversed, ultimately causing all matter and energy to collapse into nothingness. When the Big Crunch scenario is complete, known physics will have played out its role, which means that we can no longer model or draw any reliable conclusions about this extra-scientific scenario.

Nevertheless, we may of course still speculate about what such an event might entail. One possible outcome—and perhaps even a likely one—of the Big Crunch scenario is that all witnesses, information, and any causal remnants of the past are lost in a genuinely hard sense.

The Big Crunch is today not a particularly popular theory about the future of the universe. Rather, the opposite scenario is expected to occur: that the expansion continues at an accelerating rate, whereby existence becomes increasingly sparse.

But for my purposes it does not matter whether the Big Crunch scenario constitutes the fate of our universe or not. What I intend to arrive at, instead, is an imaginable point—something that is possible to visualize—which, nonetheless, entirely lacks witnesses, information, or any causal remnants of the past. At such a point , it would still seem reasonable to claim that what has happened in the past has indeed happened, even if no information, witnesses, or evidence of it exist any longer.

Those familiar with my previous output may think that I am now contradicting myself in the most direct way. Indeed, in my earlier essay, The Circle Dance of Personal Identity, I presented a distinctive view of time that seems to go against what I have said about the Big Crunch scenario. Among other things, I claimed that:

It is not time that changes the system; instead, it is the change of the system that gives rise to what we perceive as time. If the system is perfectly restored to its initial condition after each round, no ‘before’ would exist, because time is then literally restored. And if we restore time, we can’t really talk about the time before the restoration of time. It would be a logical monstrosity to do that.

But now, with my new Big Crunch scenario, I seem instead to be claiming the opposite, since I now maintain that it remains an ontological fact that something has happened, even when everything is gone.  How can I allow myself to do this? This issue must be clarified before we can proceed.

My account of time in that essay was precisely an account of time itself. I never claimed that what happened in the past had never happened. What I claimed, instead, was just that it did not matter whether a given scenario had occurred once or a hundred times, but that each occurrence constituted the very same time.

In addition, consider the following: is it not clear that what has happened has, in fact, happened? Of course, we can conceive of some form of creationism in which all memories of earlier events were implanted in us one second ago, and our memories of the past are therefore “fake.” But this type of ultra-sceptical Matrix game is not fruitful and will hardly lead us forward to any substantial knowledge when we do philosophy.

Let us thus return to the main point of this essay: what is so special about the fact that what has happened in the past has indeed happened, even if no information, witnesses, or evidence of it exist any longer? It is simply this: a past that no longer exists points directly toward the realm of mind—for we can understand a bygone “scene” even though this understanding does not require a spatial specification; after all, the past no longer has existence in space.

This claim can be generalized further for those who are not satisfied with merely pointing toward the past. I believe, for example, that it can be successfully argued that the present and the past share the same ontological status; that there is nothing special about the present (or, for that matter, about the past). I argued for this at some length, albeit indirectly, in the essay The Circle Dance of Personal Identity. But what about the future? If the future exists, there are good reasons to assume that it has the same ontological status as the past and the present. This follows simply from the fact that, if the past and the present share the same ontological status, then the present constitutes the future when viewed from the perspective of the past.

Consequently, if the past requires no spatial specification, it would seem that the same should hold for the present and the future. And in truth this is not surprising at all, for we are, and always have been, in the realm of mind.

What I have presented in this essay does not constitute an argument with premises and conclusions. Rather, what I have offered is a simple narrative about what I believe is our reality, within which we find ourselves situated. Note also that I did not primarily intend to make an epistemological claim, but rather an ontological one; one that attempts to say something about our reality by pointing toward it, without the need, nor the possibility, to offer a spatial specification.

My aim with this essay is to demystify the idea that space is not an ontological primary, while at the same time making this insight more concrete. How successful I have been in doing so is for you to decide. But if you continue to search for the coordinates of the coordinates, there is a significant risk that your search will fail—for it is we that constitute the coordinates.