What Happens When You Experience
Part 2 of the Core Concepts series
Part 1 laid the ground. Awareness as the primitive substrate. The Field of Infinite Potential containing everything that could be. B₀ carving out what’s coherent from what’s forever incoherent. That’s the static foundation — the stage, the constraints, the domain of the possible.
But nothing’s happening yet.
The coherent potentials are just sitting there. Tᵤ — the stuff that could become experience — isn’t experience. It’s not actualized. It’s not lived. Something has to move. Something has to select.
That’s what this article is about. How the static becomes dynamic. How potential becomes actual. How experience happens.
The Problem of Determinacy
Here’s something easy to overlook: your experience right now is this experience and not some other.
You’re reading these words. Not different words. Not a purple elephant. Not the taste of coffee or the sound of rain or the feeling of grass under your feet. All of those are coherent possibilities — none of them violate B₀. But you’re experiencing this.
Experience is determinate. Specific. Particular.
That’s not a trivial observation. It’s a constraint that needs explaining. If there’s a whole domain of coherent potential just sitting there, why does this one become actual rather than another? The mere existence of possibilities doesn’t pick one out. Relations and configurations alone don’t select. They just are.
This is what’s called Inevitability 3: determinacy requires a principle of actualization.
Something has to do the selecting. Not a brain, not neural pathways, not some smashing together of atoms, quarks, or leptons — none of that yields appearing (that was Inevitability 2). Not randomness either — randomness doesn't explain why this rather than that, it just throws up its hands. Something that actually brings one coherent potential into actuality as lived experience.
TNT calls this something a conscious aperture.
The Conscious Aperture (Cᵢ)
Before the objections start forming — and I can hear them — let me be clear about what a conscious aperture is not.
It’s not a soul. It’s not a ghost in the machine. It’s not your personality, your ego, your sense of self, your memories, your body, or your brain. It’s not a homunculus sitting somewhere behind your eyes making decisions. It’s not a “mind” in the way that word usually gets used.
A conscious aperture — Cᵢ in the notation — is an individuated point within Awareness through which selection occurs.
Think of it this way. B₀ defines coherence. Within that coherence, individuation is possible — bounded regions of partial coherence with the field of actualizable potential. These are apertures: openings through which selection can happen.
Here’s the crucial part: a Cᵢ isn’t something separate from its selecting. The individuation is the selection. The act of selection is what constitutes the aperture as an aperture. You don’t have a selector sitting around waiting to select — the selecting is the individuating. They’re not sequential; they’re the same thing.
This avoids the homunculus problem entirely. We’re not positing a little agent inside you that does the choosing and then asking what chooses it. We’re saying: selection happens, and the locus of that selection is what we call Cᵢ. The aperture is constituted by its function, not independent of it.
Why Boundaries Matter
Here’s something else that falls out of the logic: your experience isn’t my experience.
This might seem obvious — of course your experience isn’t mine, we’re different people. But think about what that actually means. There’s a real boundary between perspectives. I don’t access your appearing from within mine. You don’t experience my pain when I stub my toe. We might communicate about our experiences, but the experiences themselves are distinct and non-overlapping.
That’s not a bug. It’s a requirement.
If the principle of actualization — whatever does the selecting — were unbounded, there’d be one universal experience. Everything selected at once into one giant cosmic appearing. But that’s not what we find. We find multiplicity. Perspectives. Your view and my view and presumably the views of every other conscious being, none of them collapsible into the others.
This is what’s called Inevitability 4: experiential boundaries are real.
The principle of actualization must be individuated. Bounded. Not one universal selector, but many — each with its own domain of access, its own perspective, its own actualizations. That’s what Cᵢ captures: the conscious aperture is inherently bounded. It doesn’t have access to everything; it has access to what’s accessible for it.
And this brings us to a crucial question: if not everything is accessible to every aperture, what determines what’s on the menu?
What’s Available for Selection
Here’s where it gets precise.
The global coherence boundary (B₀) defines what’s actualizable in principle — the domain Tᵤ. But not everything in Tᵤ is available to every Cᵢ in every state. There’s a further constraint.
TNT calls this the micro-boundary condition: Bµ.
Bµ is state-dependent. It’s derived from Memory — the accumulated totality of all actualizations across all conscious apertures. Every actualization that has occurred contributes to M, and M shapes what’s accessible.
The result is AccessibleTᵤ: the subset of coherent potential that’s available for selection by a given Cᵢ given its state.
Here’s the key insight: Bµ is globally defined — same coherence predicate for everyone — but it’s evaluated against state. And your state isn’t my state. Your accumulated actualizations aren’t mine. So even though we’re both constrained by the same Bµ, what passes that filter is different for each of us.
AccessibleTᵤ is Cᵢ-specific not because there’s a separate boundary per aperture, but because each aperture brings a different history to the same constraint.
Think of it like two people standing in different parts of a landscape. The laws of physics are the same for both — same gravity, same light, same air. But what each person can see, reach, and interact with depends on where they’re standing. The constraints are universal; the accessible domain is positional.
That’s the relationship between Bµ and AccessibleTᵤ. Universal constraint, individuated access.
The Selection Event
So we have:
A conscious aperture (Cᵢ) — the individuated locus of selection
Accessible potential (AccessibleTᵤ) — what’s available for that aperture to select from
The constraints that shape both (B₀ globally, Bµ locally)
What happens when selection actually occurs?
TNT calls this the Now: N.
Not “now” in the sense of clock time. Not a moment within an already-existing temporal stream. The Now is the selection event itself — the act by which one element of AccessibleTᵤ becomes actual experience.
The Now is indivisible — but not in a temporal sense. Saying “instantaneous” would already presuppose time, and TNT holds that time isn’t fundamental. “Indivisible” here means logically atomic: the selection event doesn’t decompose into smaller selection events. It’s the irreducible unit of actualization.
(A note on language: I’m using words like “event” and “happens” that carry temporal connotations. That’s unavoidable — we’re temporal beings using temporal language. The framework predicts this limitation. What matters is the logical flow: (Cᵢ + AccessibleTᵤ) → N → Tₐ → M. The notation doesn’t presuppose time; our words do.)
What Actualization Actually Is
I want to be careful here because this is where things can get confused.
An actualization — Tₐ — isn’t a representation of experience. It isn’t a correlate of experience. It isn’t what experience produces or what produces experience.
The actualization is the experience.
To have an experience is for a Cᵢ to effect a Tₐ via selection. The Tₐ itself is what’s lived. There’s no gap between the actualization and the experiencing — they’re the same event described two ways. “Actualization” is the ontological term; “experience” is what it’s like from the inside.
This collapses a distinction that causes endless trouble in philosophy of mind. Physicalists want to identify experience with brain states. Dualists want to keep them separate. Both approaches presuppose that experience is one thing and whatever “realizes” it is another, and then they fight about the relationship.
TNT sidesteps this. Experience isn’t realized by something else. Experience is actualization. Full stop.
Consciousness Isn’t Awareness
One clarification before we move on, because this trips people up.
Consciousness isn’t the same thing as Awareness.
Awareness — capital A — is the primitive ground we talked about in Part 1. Non-agentive. Not a mind. Not doing anything. The substrate within which everything exists.
Consciousness is what happens when a conscious aperture is actually operating within that ground. It’s Awareness as it appears within the experiential domain of a Cᵢ. Consciousness isn’t fundamental in TNT — it’s what you get when the fundamental (Awareness) is accessed through an individuated aperture that’s selecting and actualizing.
You could say: Awareness is the ocean. A Cᵢ is a particular whirlpool in that ocean. Consciousness is what it’s like to be the whirlpool — the actual experiential character of that bounded, selecting, actualizing aperture.
The ground alone isn’t consciousness. The aperture alone isn’t consciousness. Consciousness is the activity — the selecting, the actualizing, the experiencing that happens through an individuated aperture within the ground.
What We’ve Built
Part 1 gave us the static foundation: Awareness as the primitive substrate, FIP as the totality of potential, B₀ as the eternal coherence defining what can be actualized. That’s the stage.
Part 2 makes it move:
Cᵢ (the conscious aperture): An individuated locus of selection within Awareness, constituted by selection itself. Not a soul, not a mind — the opening through which actualization happens.
AccessibleTᵤ: The subset of coherent potential available to a given Cᵢ, determined by the micro-boundary condition (Bµ) evaluated against that aperture’s state.
Bµ (the micro-boundary condition): A state-dependent constraint derived from Memory (M), defining what’s accessible for selection.
N (the Now): The indivisible selection event where potential becomes actual.
Tₐ (actualization): Experience itself. What’s lived. The result of selection.
These concepts lock together. You can’t have actualization without a selector. You can’t have a selector without boundaries. Boundaries imply differential access. Differential access means Cᵢ-specific AccessibleTᵤ. And the event that brings one accessible potential into actuality is the Now.
That’s the architecture of experience.
But we’ve left something dangling.
I said Bµ is derived from Memory — from the accumulated totality of all actualizations. And I said each Cᵢ brings a different history to the same constraint. That raises an obvious question: what becomes of actualizations? Where does this “Memory” come from? How do accumulated actualizations constrain accessible ones without collapsing into them?
That’s coming up next.
Next: “The Persistence of Memory” — what becomes of actualizations, and how the accumulated shapes the accessible.