Fig. 1.

a A quantitative transition is suggested to apply for the pathological development of self-consciousness toward the final occurrence of nihilism in schizophrenic individuals. This transition initiates with phenomenological gaps toward the self and the environment. Later, phenomenological solipsism expands toward the self and the environment including all its objects and living beings into the deeper epistemological stage. This transition ultimately reaches the more extreme characteristic of ontological nihilism concerning the annihilation of the self and the world, that is, Being, and hence the most fundamental stage of existence. b Subjective time and space: the temporo-spatial frame or extension of consciousness increasingly shrinks from stage 1, over stage 2, to stage 3 as the pathological development proceeds. On a most fundamental level of Being, conscious experience consists of TPCs between the self and the world. While healthy TPCs exist aside critical and fragmented ones in stage 1, the balance continuously shifts to abnormal TPCs as in stage 3. In stage 3, nihilism is associated with the severance of the self-world structure, since the intentional arc, reflected by the white TPCs including their interconnected lines, no longer properly spans across both the self and the world. TPCs, temporo-spatial connections.