Ilin's Ontology

We have two layers.

Yes, we do: Cass's Shenanigans & Preliminary Observations

The bottom layer is the unconscious, it is stuff that would be considered "outside" stuff in like typical mind body dualism. It is the Kantian noumenon, that is, it is unknowable because we (when I use the first person I am referring to the conscious experience) do not have access to it, it transcends what consciousness "deals" with. The unconscious consists of bodies that we have no access to, hence un-conscious. There is nothing to say here, they are completely unknowable, and their existence is unknowable.

If it’s completely unknowable and we can say that it’s unknowable, then it already seems to be doing work inside the system. I get the move, but I'm not sure why this is necessary to be considered as a "layer" in what you're trying to flesh out. It's also definitely not the same as the Kantian noumenon, since his isn’t a hidden causal layer (ontology-oriented); it’s a limit on what can be meaningfully known at all (epistemic). What you’re describing seems more like a structured but inaccessible process that still has explanatory power, which already goes beyond Kant.

The top layer is the subconscious / the body, everything that produces effects, everything that is in extension. It is the state of affairs, but the state of affairs that is only available to consciousness through the effects that it produces. It produces effects mechanically, they are caused by stuff in extension but only the effects can be perceived in consciousness.

Lots of Spinoza-adjacent thought. I’d just be careful not to smuggle in a hidden little homunculus called “the body producing effects mechanically,” because then one way or the other we’ll be back to a second explanatory agent.

Consciousness is how memory gets encoded in the body, it is the recognition of stable patterns of effects. It is like a screen upon which the subconscious presents effects continuously. Effects are produced and they permeate consciousness, they leave imprints which are forgotten as a selection mechanism for memory. Each snapshot fades, but places where the same difference is present leave traces. Stuff that is not forgotten permeates and creates the image of a body / the image of a continuous self as if burned into the retina of perception.

I have a lot to say from this point on. So I'll take a bit of time before saying them.

This is where adequate / inadequate ideas go, which are informed by "good" / "bad" affects.

The ego is created, the illusion of a body or whatever as scarred attention, as patterns that have burnt themselves onto the screen from overuse.

the ego is what the continuous / very present parts of consciousness feel like, its the qualitative (as in qualia) expression of effects that are so strongly imprinted onto consciousness that they seem to form an identity that interacts with other effects. It is the image of the body, the image of the thing that produces effects (that is to say, the thing that is mistaken to be a cause, since we never have access to the body itself, only to the effects that posit themselves to be the body), because it is recognized as persistent enough so as to constitute stable identity.

When this stable identity is something like a table, we have no trouble recognizing that it is an effect because it disappears and reappears and so we have the remembering of the forgetting which serves as a mechanism for understanding something as an effect. But when it is particularly strong, the effect no longer is allowed to be forgotten, and we have the creation of a stable identity that is taken to be a condition for the body.

consciousness is useful. It is useful for the body to be aware of stable patterns, this is what consciousness is trying to isolate

qualitative difference cannot exist in the object of consciousness, they only manifest as expressions of duration. The object of consciousness only contains regions of greater / lesser "intensity", stuff that has permeated more or less through time. In time, these form qualitative differences, they form stable patterns of "flow", but in space, in the object of consciousness there are no flows because there is no difference to be encoded as a pattern, to be encoded as a quality. Quantity is mediated through the repetition of qualitative difference, and qualitative difference is mediated through the return of a stable pattern of difference, it is how effects are encoded into memory.