I have gotten no sleep this night, but I will try to be coherent. Forgive me if I fail. :)
I am going at this from a basically Kantian and Heideggerian standpoint, that is, metaphysics (neither would have used that word) is the study of the necessary structures of being/experience (which are the same things as far as we are concerned).
Space is not as far as I can tell a necessary feature of experience. We experience it because we move around and we have a particular set of senses. I see an object; I move toward it and it appears to grow larger. It is positioned with other objects to the right and left, above and below. I pick it up and turn it over; I can see it from various angles. It changes appearance as I turn it around. I feel its weight shift in my hand. That's the experience of space.
A hypothetical genius barnacle would have no such experience. A sessile organism that lacked sight, but had only hearing, would likely experience things in terms of location (that sound comes from that direction) and intensity (that sound is loud), but not distance.
--- On Mon, 7/27/09, Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote: Also there is an external motivation. I want to get to a theory of mind that can be used in empirical studies of the mind that can also be extended to animals. While us and furries both share spacetime in a 3-d eucidean space, it is a lot easier to account for the similarities of mind between us and animals if you convert over to space constructions and studies. It is a lot more difficult to account for some similarity of mind between us, if we have to start with the nature of the phenomenon given to conscieousness in the sense of a time like experience. We damn well know animals navigate space. We don't necessarily know they experience pain or what we might mean by that.