TRANSPARENCY AND THE APHENOMENAL MODEL

The aphenomenal modelling of "transparency" starts from placing maximum transparency at one end of a spectrum, and total opacity at the other end, and then discussing degrees in between these poles. As this approach renders it impossible to assert what transparency itself is, in the first place, then what transparency is in its relationships to its internal components and to the external world, aphenomenality is inherent in it.

There are four kinds of transparency that can be readily distinguished:

1 - no screen between subject & object, and mutual awareness of each other;
2 - subject knows there is a screen but object does not, e.g., one-way glass;
3 - neither the subject nor the object know there is a screen through which other third parties observe them; and
4 - both subject and object know there is a screen and/but they can observe one another.

As far as an external third-party observer is concerned, the first, third and fourth look substantially similar, yet each of these scenarios would obviously look and be experienced entirely differently by the subject and object involved. The first, second and fourth are transparent for the subject and a third-party. In the second case, nothing is transparent for the object, and in the third something is hidden from both the subject and object even though they experience transparency with respect to each other.

Natural transparency - the first case - involves no third party regulating or modulating relations between a subject and an object. Aphenomenality arises in each of the other cases as an outgrowth of such third-party involvement.