“The space of all possible conscious experience” — and what it means that one point is actual.

Color is king in our innate quality space.

— W. V. O. Quine, Natural Kinds, 1969

The space of all possible conscious experience.

— Richard P. Stanley, Qualia Space, 1999

…the only simple notions whose specialisations form a multiply extended manifoldness are the positions of perceived objects and colours.

— Bernhard Riemann, 1854 (trans. Clifford, 1873)

A quality space is an ordering of the qualities presented by a sensory modality in which relative similarities among those qualities are represented by their relative distances.

— Austen Clark, A Theory of Sentience, 2000

The idea

For a century and a half the notion of a Qualia Space has surfaced wherever experience is studied: in the geometry of color, in the logic of similarity, in behavioral learning, in the brain's own maps, in the mathematics of consciousness. Each field found it independently and named it differently, but the idea is the same. Wherever there is experience there is nearness and distance between different qualities: red close to orange, far from green. Order those relations and a space appears, in which every experience holds a position among its alternatives. Whether that position is real, and what it does, are the questions this site pursues: ontology, actuality, value, and AI consciousness.

Projects

Active · 2026 Consciousness Science 2026, San Diego

Hypermodal Realism

Working draft, abstract and slides.

Read the draft
Master thesis · 2013 University of Oslo

Perceptual Representation

What is the difference between conscious and unconscious pattern recognition?

Read the thesis

Further projects to follow.