Abstract

According to this system, certain knowledge must be based upon consciousness since the fact of consciousness is, as Descartes opined, self-validating. The 'subjective I' may be considered to be none other than the objective self as unsynthesized by space and time. Space and time allow for brute consciousness by facilitating the fact that consciousness has contents, is consciousness of something. At the first stage of correlation, one finds by inspection and analysis that the proto-contents of consciousness are sensations, feelings, and passions perceived as discrete entities. These contents could not be discrete and perceivable absent the working of space and time, since to perceive two things as discretely different is to perceive them in differing spatio-temporal locations. Thus any constitution of reality must be ultimately founded upon the proto-contents of this brute consciousness. Next, any construction of reality must be in accordance with the three basic logical rules necessitated by space and time--the laws of identity, contradiction, and conservation. ;At the second stage of correlation, complex objects are fashioned from the discrete entities found by inspection and analysis in the field of consciousness, by employing a concept of cause, according to some freely chosen logical method just so long as that method does not violate the previous logical rules of identity, contradiction, and conservation. ;At the third stage of correlation, negotiations may be entered into with other selves in order to synthesize these complex objects into a comprehensive and systematically unified reality which will be a given cosmology. The systematic agreements necessary to generate a given cosmological reality are based by the previous logical prescriptions, together with the requirement of logical consistency. A given cosmology may be correlated by the various ways of knowing--epistemologically , axiologically , aesthetically , and deontologically . These ways of knowing correlate the very same cosmological reality from the standpoint of their own unique perspective