Psychical and physical realms: SMM/DTT and Panpsychism and cosmopsychism

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

Panpsychist approaches make experiential or protoexperiential properties fundamental and widespread. Cosmopsychism gives priority to a cosmic experiential whole. These positions face different explanatory directions: combining many experiences into one subject and accounting for distinct subjects within an experiential whole. Shani’s cosmopsychism offers an original philosophical treatment of the second route.

SMM’s one source is structurally closer to a top-down dependence than to a collection of independent micro-subjects, but a nonspatial generative source is not automatically a cosmic consciousness. The additional experiential claim must be stated. A useful example is a shared database accessed through separate permissions: one information source can support several perspectives, yet nothing about permissions alone establishes that those perspectives feel like anything. A source theory needs both individuation and an account of experience. Cosmopsychism can sharpen that task, while DTT contributes an explicit interest in how differentiated access and temporal histories are generated. ^[1]

04The precise agreement and difference

Cosmopsychism gives experience a fundamental role and treats ordinary minds as dependent on a wider experiential reality. SMM/DTT’s psychical–physical distinction can align with that view if the Single Monad is given an experiential character. It can also remain neutral about that character while modelling the production of both descriptions. The comparison should make this extra premise visible.

The difficult bridge is between private experience and public physical regularity. A cosmic experiential ground must explain why bodily interventions reliably alter reports and capacities, while a source-generated physical model must explain why a particular perspective is lived from within. DTT’s differentiated access and retained histories offer a useful structural vocabulary, but do not establish that access boundaries are subject boundaries. The six nested levels could organize how perspectives arise without being six mental worlds. The strongest comparison therefore treats cosmopsychism as a philosophical hypothesis about intrinsic nature and DTT as a proposed generative architecture. Their combination is promising only when the correspondence between architecture, body and experience is explicit. ^[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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