….can we make this coherent? What if subjective experience, as it appears in the first person, were the sensori-motor manifold in the third person (as seen in P-worlds, and hence amenable to science). If this were so, then an improved understanding of the characteristics of the SMM might help us chart variation in subjective experience.

I’m reluctant to add another term to the mix. I’ll try out the SMM for size. P-world was a technical term I reluctantly introduced, and it has really helped. R-world was less helpful, though there is some work outstanding there. The idea is really very similar to the idea of the Neural Correlate of Consciousness. Indeed, does it differ? I think perhaps, because in searching for the NCC, the focus is rarely, if ever on making the imaginative leap of interpreting what you see in terms of subjective experience. These are similar ideas, but as I’m telling it, the emphasis is on co-development of the first and third person views.

I’ve been wondering about the form of the P-world. I have this graphic image of wisps, extending back, densest near the infinitesimal disk of the now. Wispy strands, which are related to what we call ‘memory’ in our mistaken psychology of the individual. Individuals have strands in their P-worlds, but it is only in conjunction with their environment that these become usable memories. That much of memory is collective. I believe that much of what we expect to find in the brain will be found to have a two part structure: a personal, individual part in the P-world, and a collective or environmental element. It is only in unifying the Barker and Gibson approaches that we can see that the environment is our collective self (the one that knows how to build cities, and bring baby up right). Only the first part of that might be found in the brain.

If we do not see the collective phenomena across P-worlds as real, how will we ever solve Jerusalem?