Consciousness and Existence as a Process

The problem of consciousness is traditionally understood as the difficult task of justifying the emergence of an inner world of experiences, qualia and/or mental representations from a substrate of physical things conceived as autonomously existing. I argue that an alternative approach is possible, but it requires a conceptual reconstruction of consciousness and existence as two different perspectives on the same underlying process. On this basis, I present a view of direct (conscious) perception that supposes a unity of the activity in the brain and the events in the external world. The underlying process is referred to as onphene. I will use the example of the rainbow as an intuition pump to introduce this new approach, which is eventually used to explain features of consciousness such as illusions, memory, dreams, and phosphenes. The proposed view shares some elements with neo-realism and process ontology, and t can be considered as a form of radical empiricism.