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This work aims to develop a structural model of consciousness and its psychological configurations.

July 22, 20260 citationsOpen Access

Consciousness Structure: A Nested-Boundary Model of Psychological Configuration

Key Points

This work aims to develop a structural model of consciousness and its psychological configurations.
Introduces a nested-boundary model incorporating boundaries of the mind, encompassing dissociative and egoic layers.
Explores the implications of permeability and coherence within this model for understanding psychopathological conditions.
Situates autism and psychedelic risks within this boundary framework.
Proposes a dynamic understanding of psychological configurations, such as melancholia and psychopathy, on the nested boundary model.
Suggests that integrative coherence is crucial for mental stability and well-being.
Offers a new perspective on prognosis within the structural spectrum of psychoanalysis.

Abstract

Abstract: Psychological and contemplative configurations — the neuroses, the depressions, psychopathy, psychosis, dissociative identity, awakening — occupy a single structured space. This essay maps it. Under analytic idealism, an individual mind is a dissociated alter of mind-at-large, and the alter's boundary admits a formal description as a Markov blanket; the architectural claim developed here is that this description nests: the dissociative boundary constituting the alter, the egoic boundary within it, and complexes as sub-blankets within that. Permeability is then boundary-relative — the ego's openness to the alter's own dissociated content and its openness to trans-alter content are distinct, dissociable parameters whose serial composition explains cases a single axis cannot: melancholia, sealed to the world yet invaded from within; primary psychopathy, silent behind a wall nothing constituted presses against; the mystic and the psychotic, identical in openness and opposite in everything else. Integrative coherence — a vector of stabilization, discernment, and compassion — supplies the second dimension, with regulation derived as coherence exercised at a boundary rather than smuggled as a third. A dynamics of transitions yields a structural theory of prognosis; the psychoanalytic structural spectrum enters as the typical developmental trajectory rather than a rival taxonomy; autism is situated as a calibration of the inferential channel rather than a position in the space; psychedelic risk profiles are derived from a single principle — the pharmacology moves only the fast variable. The far end of the boundary axis is mapped through biological death to its single limit point, with the epistemology that limit imposes. The model is a conceptual heuristic; its predictions are stated so that it can fail. Keywords: dissociation · Markov blanket · psychopathology · analytic idealism · permeability · coherence · psychedelics · contemplative development · prognosis · autism Part of the Return to Consciousness research program — 30 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics. Full project: https://returntoconsciousness.org/

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