Psychical and physical realms: SMM/DTT and Ibn Arabi’s metaphysics

01The question behind the comparison

Psychical and physical can name two kinds of description, two kinds of property, two modes of access, or two distinct realms of being. These are different positions. SMM/DTT’s attraction is the possibility that a single generative source supports both an outwardly measurable world and inwardly meaningful experience. A clear comparison begins by stating what the distinction means. Otherwise a shift from first-person experience to an additional spatial dimension can occur without argument.

An experience of red and a measurement of reflected light are related but answer different questions. The measurement specifies a public procedure and result. The experience concerns how something appears to a subject. A single-source ontology may seek to ground both, yet common dependence does not itself establish an identity between them or a law connecting them. If the psychical is given an autonomous causal role in physical events, the role must be specified. If it is a different aspect of the same events, the task is to explain the correspondence and the limits of each description.

DTT’s six nested inner levels belong to its proposed organization of generation. They should not be assigned one by one to unverified mental dimensions, nor equated with a list of brain networks merely because both lists contain several entries. A bridge to consciousness needs a criterion of subjecthood and a mapping from source states to accessible experience. A bridge to physics needs observables, probabilities and a dynamical law. The two bridges may share structure, but they remain distinct explanatory tasks. This allows the metaphysical programme to stay ambitious while its empirical claims remain precise.

02The single-source and nested-time proposal

SMM begins with one nonspatial generative source. DTT distinguishes its inner production from the outer order in which completed results become accessible. The six inner levels are nested functional dependencies within that production; the seventh denotes outer completion. They are not six independent clocks, six spatial directions, or six simultaneously occupied temporal axes. This distinction makes the framework more specific than a general claim that everything changes: it asks how a world of persistent relations can be generated before its spatial representation is taken for granted. ^[2]

03The comparator’s explanatory structure

Ibn Arabi’s writings examine the relation of divine reality, manifestation and the forms through which reality is known. The translated passage on barzakh offers a particularly useful primary example: mediation can distinguish two orders while relating them. This is a metaphysical and interpretive relation, not a measured extra spatial direction.

For SMM/DTT the historical connection is direct, but the modern reconstruction must still state its own contribution. A source state, retained memory and a completion rule are mathematical commitments whose validity depends on definitions and argument. They cannot be attributed to a medieval text merely because a familiar metaphor can illustrate them. Conversely, translating every spiritual expression into a physical variable can lose distinctions the text was intended to preserve. The most illuminating comparison identifies a shared question about unity and manifestation, then explains what the modern temporal construction adds to that question. It also avoids simply identifying the Single Monad, any created intermediary and divine reality without attending to their different roles. ^[1]

04The precise agreement and difference

Ibn Arabi’s barzakh provides a powerful comparison for the relation between psychical and physical: a mediating order can both distinguish and connect. SMM/DTT’s inner generation and outer completion can develop this idea as a relation between conditions of appearance and accessible forms. The affinity is structural and metaphysical, not evidence that an imaginal realm is a hidden spatial compartment.

The mirror example is particularly useful. An image is meaningfully encountered without being a second material object behind the glass. This helps resist the assumption that every real mode of appearance must occupy ordinary space in the same way. DTT can formalize a readout relation that produces observable form, while a philosophical account interprets how meaning belongs to that form. The two steps should remain visible. A source-state map does not exhaust spiritual imagination, and the historical concept does not specify a quantum Hamiltonian. The comparison strengthens SMM’s account of mediation by preserving differences of access and meaning while seeking a common generative dependence. ^[1]

05Worked example: what follows and what does not

A person silently imagines a triangle and later draws it. The imagined triangle is not a small physical object hidden behind the eyes; the drawing is not identical to the act of imagining. Both can be related through a person’s capacities, intentions and bodily actions. An account can treat these as two aspects of one process, as causally interacting states, or as different levels of description. Each interpretation must explain the same ordinary sequence without confusing representation with represented object. SMM/DTT’s source unity can frame the relation, but the transition from imagination to drawing still calls for a specified account of agency and physical action.

06What this comparison contributes

The most productive comparison therefore asks how a theory handles access, identity and causation across the distinction. Does it preserve first-person meaning? Does it explain public agreement? Does it introduce new causal effects or reinterpret familiar ones? Psychical discourse can make a serious philosophical contribution without being labelled a new measured dimension. Conversely, a genuine physical proposal becomes stronger when its additional variables and their observable effects are stated independently of the metaphysical language that motivated them.

THE SAME QUESTION, DIFFERENT STARTING POINTS

The comparison at a glance

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