Abstract

This paper develops a non-dual ontology of consciousness grounded in an integrated trajectory that links pragmatism, radical constructivism, and contemporary relational interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rather than treating consciousness as an object, a property, or an emergent feature of neural substrates, the analysis begins by rejecting the subject-object dichotomy as an ontological assumption inherited from classical metaphysics. Building on the pragmatist notion of experience as a continuous field (James, Dewey) and on the constructivist insight that cognitive agents never access a world “in itself” but only relational invariances (von Glasersfeld, Maturana, Varela), consciousness is reframed as a form of reflexive differentiation within an ontologically unitary field of being. Within this framework, “relation” does not denote an interaction between pre-existing entities; rather, entities themselves are understood as local differentiations—“folds” or structural articulations—of a single ontic continuum. Consciousness is then conceptualized not as a phenomenon generated by the encounter of two subjects, nor as the correlate of internal neural states, but as the appearance of a reflexive configuration in which one local differentiation of being represents others within the same ontological field. This non-dual structure aligns naturally with relational interpretations of quantum mechanics (Rovelli) and with decoherence-based accounts of classicality (Zurek). These frameworks undermine the notion of intrinsic properties possessed by isolated systems, replacing them with state-ascriptions that are always relative to an interactional context. Such relational ontology in physics provides an instructive formal parallel—not a causal foundation—to the thesis that consciousness arises when the relation itself becomes phenomenally accessible from a local point of view. The resulting model offers a conceptual alternative to dualism, emergentism, and panpsychism. Consciousness is neither a separate substance, nor a byproduct of neural complexity, nor a ubiquitous feature of matter. It is an event in which the unity of being becomes reflexively manifest through one of its own differentiations. This ontological reframing clarifies the status of subjectivity, grounds the continuity between cognitive systems and their environments, and offers a coherent framework for understanding co-consciousness in hybrid human-machine systems.