Space is not as far as I can tell a necessary feature of experience... A hypothetical genius barnacle would have no such experience.
Chris Doss
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Two things maybe more. You are approaching the concept of space, as a conscieous experience or as an artifact of consceiousness, or a conscieous phenomenon. Therefore your ontology follows from conscieousness.
I am trying to look at the problem in a different way. Nothing, Being, and Becoming follow from a logio-mathematical identity, dialectic and dualistic mirror from Nothing-Being. This is almost pre-Socratic level mysticism, which I think of as the core of a metaphysical-ontological concept. Space exists external to us, prior in time and logically a priori analytic as given. It is a fundamental construct of the manifold of reality.
In the processes of evolution, organism have adapted to various features of this manifold, including (most importantly from my perspective) gravity, the directed force vector that points down. So organisms without any form of central nervous system like plants have entrained their physical shape and symmetries of form about the gravitational vector. There are other physical features or phenomenon like light that also exist a priori (logically, and concretely) to conscieousness that are also part of the environment.
I think I can develop a pretty foundational correspondence between Space -> matter -> gravity, and another set of correspondences Time -> energy -> light. In this ontology (which is identical to the philosophy of physics), the issue is the logio-mathematical construct, or ontology of Space and Time which are joined in a Hegelian way to become the dynamic concrete world we evolved from and live in. We consider it as the unfolding of events constituted from matter and energy as they manifest in spacetime.
Now the connection to conscieousness as a fundamental constituent or experience of space is so basic we all forget it. We learn to walk or move or watch others in motion, even if we can not move ourselves, or we can not see or hear others in motion, long before we learn almost anything else. Helen Keller for example, managed to develop an articulated conscieousness from her tactile-kinesthic sense after she was disabled in what sounds like meningitis at age 19 mons. Therefore we ground part (and I would say the most fundamental part) of the base of our later conscieousness on our motions in space and their consequence sense of physical forces...and our motor responses to these forces---that is our sense of our bodies in motion.
Now there are some critical pieces missing, maybe many. For me the most critical piece in this theory of mind is a proof from mathematics that demostrates that an abstract concept of space achieves its fundamental symmetries not just from the permutations on its irreducible and minimum point set (incidence geometry or topological space). These symmetries (homologies?) also arise in a physical way through the presence of matter and physical forces, especially `ordering' forces like gravity and light or electro-magnetism.
There is a drawing in Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen, Geometry and the Imagination, on page 85, fig 92 that gave me this idea about the dihedral symmetries and the presence of a gravitational vector (see section 13 Crystallographic Classes and Groups of Motion in Space). See it here:
Click on Crystallographic Groups and scan down to figure 92. Consider the pole about which the symmetries (degrees of freedom) are created to be incident with gravity vector G.
BTW for math nuts out there. This book is right up there with Galileo and Euclid. I consider it an introduction to the entire realm of modernity and mathematical physics. The other must read, is David Hilbert, Foundations of Geometry. Hilbert was one deep motherfucker. He was no stranger to the concept that mathematics was ontology. On page 3 in FOG he orders the axiom sets of geometry starting with the axioms of incidence, i.e. that's where I got the confirmation, I was somehow on a correct path since I studied the axioms of incidence before I read their confirmation in Hilbert. Obviously the authors I read had read Hilbert.
Technically, the model for the symmetries of 3-d space are the motions of a square (order 8 subgroup) and/or tetrahedron (full symmetric group S4). The fundamental identity to establish a correspondence between a regular polyhedron and physics is to map the null, center of mass, , or axis of revolution as the point through which the gravity vector passes. This is the invariant, the point or line about which everything rotates, the element of the group which in-it-self does not change under rotation and or reflections (in the minimal case of the triangle for finite groups and does not change in the infinite case for the circle [Lie Groups] and or sphere, and does not change in the 3-d version in the tetrahedron).
If you diagram the human body as a symmetric construction in space the intersection of the gravity vector of the body (up-down), the trace of nerves from the eyes (front-back) and ears (right-left) all intersect in a region that corresponds with the greater thalamic region, one of the most basic features of the brain in conjunction with the basal ganglia, is one of oldest parts of the brain in evolutionary terms. This anatomic structure somehow corresponds to our concept of an inertia guidance system sans program (the programs come from learning in the physical environment). It is also what we train when we creat motion without thinking about it, like playing a piano, dancing. learning to walk, and learning to climb---where I discovered it, since I don't do piano or dance.
Our sense of space is therefore founded in the absolute lowest, almost unconscieous region of the brain. It is also the putative seat for the sense, `of being in the world, as a body', that is the fundament of conscieousness. Psychology considers this region the root sense of conscieousness. In medicine, if this region shows very little activity you are considered brain-dead.
I've seen dozens and dozen of these coma bodies in the back wards under the title, Subacute Care, which means life support, i.e a respirator. I've even gotten of couple of these people into wheelchairs, fitted them and ignored the horror of what I was doing---which was taking them off the very expensive hospital care, to the nursing home, fit to die wards--so their families can pretend they are not actually killing them. It is very weird to manipulate a body that can not breath on its own, yet responds to my manipulations, and has no conscieousness. The response arises from a lifetime of physical conditioning... In some of these cases the respirator is mainly a back-up against a possible failure from the brain stem to initate a breathing reflex in the connection to the spinal core bundles feeding the chest...we are that far down into the concept of mind---like reptiles in hyernation. Just fucking creepy. The folks in bio-science and linguistics are not quite ready for the full human clinical model.
This is such abstract (possibly crazy) shit that I usually can only explain it to interested math and physics types who there are very few, but there are some---they are both climbers. The problem is they are not that familiar with philosophy and know very little about brain anatomy or biology or medicine. In other words mathematicians and physicist usually don't know they are doing ontology of mind.
Now you can construct a similar ontological understanding of biological systems and the concept of time. The general track goes like this. Time is not a monotonic series---you can not `count' a monotonic repetition---there is something about differences in the interval that accrue to the concept of time. It is a convergent series, such that the rate of change of the rate of change is both entrainable as a `clock', and also registers a sense of `time' by us. The general direction of proof of this strange physiological feature is that we loose our sense of time, if we have no usual light rate of change to entrain us, so our biological clock goes off---and technically we don't even have a biological clock as a discrete feature. We have a collection of anatomical and physiological system that are entrained on these changing rates of change in light. We also loose this entrainment as jet lag. That is the constant `measure' of our sense of time has been altered by our environment and physiologically fucks us up.
The line of this ontology follows the Time -> energy -> light series of correspondences. Since our entrainment is constructed on the constant environmental diurnal cycle our basic concept of time is periodic or cyclic. Yet all living things age, so there is also a telos a direction to our sense of time which is our life cycle from conception to death. So this ontology finally does get to the Heideggerian concept of time as being towards death---in the sense that we become aware of this telos and it becomes a sort of liberation, the escape back into the ontic, also the escape from history. Heidegger folds these concepts back into themselves in a way I don't quite understand. Or he repeats a dialectic of being and non-being as a kind of recursion. Nevermind.
Sorry, I am getting too lit and too tired....
CG