Consciousness and the experienced present: SMM/DTT and Panpsychism and cosmopsychism

01The question behind the comparison

The experienced present is usually richer than an isolated instantaneous sensation. A spoken word, a rhythm or a movement is apprehended through relations among successive phases. SMM/DTT’s production/completion distinction offers a language for asking how an integrated event becomes available, but it does not make the experience of a present identical to a fundamental cosmic completion. A conscious observer is a complex physical and interpretive subsystem with its own memory, expectations and report capacities.

Three questions should be distinguished. Which neural or functional processes allow information to be integrated? Which processes make that information available for report and action? Why is the process accompanied by experience at all? A theory may make progress on one without settling the others. DTT can contribute a general account of record formation and nested dependencies. To become a theory of consciousness, it would need a specific bridge linking those structures to a subject’s experience. The number of inner levels alone does not select a duration of awareness or a neural mechanism.

A completed record can also exist without a person presently noticing it. A measuring instrument may register an event and store a stable result. Whether that is enough for consciousness is precisely the kind of question on which competing theories disagree. Keeping record formation distinct from conscious awareness avoids assuming the desired conclusion. It also lets SMM/DTT compare different observer models on a common basis: what information is retained, how it is integrated, when it is accessible, and what additional property is claimed to make the state experiential.

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 begins with an experiential whole, while the experienced present belongs to a limited perspective with selective memory and anticipation. SMM/DTT’s production of local readouts could help articulate how a restricted present depends on a wider source. This is a more precise connection than saying that all minds share one cosmic now. Different observers can integrate different events over different intervals.

The philosophical difficulty is ownership. Why does one restricted set of contents constitute my present rather than merely information unavailable elsewhere in the whole? DTT’s access structure can explain informational separation, but a cosmopsychist account must add a principle connecting separation with subjecthood. The six nested levels should not be treated as six successive cosmic experiences unless that is independently argued. The useful synthesis keeps the source’s unity, the generated observer’s history and the observer’s phenomenal present distinct. It then asks what law relates them. This approach preserves the holistic ambition while avoiding an unsupported inference from common origin to identical experiences or unrestricted sharing of awareness. ^[1]

05Worked example: what follows and what does not

Hear the three notes C, E and G in sequence. At the third note, the first two are no longer physically arriving in the same way, yet their temporal relation contributes to hearing an arpeggio. If only the current acoustic sample existed for the listener with no retention, the musical relation would be lost. If the notes were all treated as simultaneous, their order would disappear. The experienced present therefore includes a differentiated relation to what has just occurred. This example motivates a memory-sensitive model of temporal experience, while leaving open whether the relevant unity is explained by neural integration, phenomenological structure or a deeper metaphysical account.

06What this comparison contributes

The strongest DTT contribution is an explicit account of how a record-bearing observer is itself generated and maintained. That can clarify why different accessible timescales coexist in one world. Claims about phenomenal consciousness should then specify what the source architecture explains beyond generic memory or information processing. This comparison respects the reality of experience while making the proposed explanation assessable, and it avoids turning every act of registration into an unexplained cosmic awareness.

THE SAME QUESTION, DIFFERENT STARTING POINTS

The comparison at a glance

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