Concepts

The field

Shared field. The totality of mental forms held as potential for human expression: one repertoire, common to all, of which each person is a partial expression. It is the largest field the model treats, itself the region of a larger space of forms that human embodiment admits. What persons share is not their contents, histories or experiences, but the field itself. It holds forms, not records: nothing biographical is stored in it, and nothing travels through it. It intends nothing.

Mental form. A determinate way that thought, affect or relation can go. Forms are of three kinds, which shade into one another: capacities, each a specific form and not another; polarities, capacities arranged as bipolar dimensions of response that ordinary life demands from both ends, such as autonomy–dependence or expression–restraint; and configurations, the larger relational and affective themes that recur across populations and epochs sharing no causal history. A polarity is one form with two poles.

Nested field. A bounded instance of the shared field: a culture, a family, a person. It is not a fenced-off portion of the repertoire but draws on the whole and expresses a selection. There is one kind of entity at every scale, and the person is its lowest instance: a mental field whose boundary has stabilized around one life.

The boundary

Reduction valve. The boundary of a nested field: a stable pattern of selection that reduces the whole of the field to what can enter expression at its point. It generates nothing and holds no contents; its one record is itself, the persistence of the pattern. It is a regularity, not a selector. Everything the individualist tradition attributes to a bounded self is located here. The term adapts Huxley's "reducing valve", widened to a pattern of selection found at every scale.

Address. Which region of the field a valve admits: the forms an instance has made its own and those it has left out. Address is set by history, and always within the exclusions of the enclosing fields, so an address is inherited before it is lived.

Resolution. How finely the field's forms are articulated at a valve: how much of a dimension is held as distinct positions rather than as a few coarse states. In persons it is set largely by constitution. Coarseness keeps expression determinate; a sharp rise in what arrives relative to what the pattern can articulate is experienced as flooding.

Goal. What holds a valve: the pattern persists for as long as there is something it is for. The earliest goals are connection and protection; later come projects and roles. In the limiting case, the pattern's own continuity, a separate identity, becomes the goal, which is what rigidity is. When a goal lapses, previously excluded material arrives as intrusion rather than expression. The goal is always the valve's, never the field's.

Exclusion

Ingression. The entry of a form into expression at a valve. Forms press toward expression continuously, and each arrives entire: what a valve does is not take delivery of a part, but express a part of what arrives. The word is Whitehead's, reaching the model through Levin. Expression is ingression reduced.

Exclusion. The condition of a pole that is not merely unused but unavailable when a situation demands it. Because ordinary life calls for both poles of a dimension, a valve stabilized at one pole leaves the other out. Since the form keeps arriving entire, exclusion is not an accomplished subtraction but a standing refusal, maintained by continuous work against continuous arrival.

Charge. The signature of exclusion: the pressure of the unexpressed half, felt from inside. It shows as the disproportionate salience of certain topics, the effort of certain avoidances, the fascination or aversion a pole produces when another person expresses it openly. Charge separates exclusion from disuse. Where there is charge, a form is arriving and being refused; where there is none, a form is simply not in demand.

Field Force. The tendency of a partly expressed form toward its whole expression. It is not an agent, nor a physical force; it is the completeness of the form. It is registered at the valve as charge and appears around the valve as completion. Direction comes from the specificity of the exclusion. It names a direction in the dynamics, not a guarantee of any outcome.

Between persons

Completion. What a valve cannot express as self is expressed elsewhere: the excluded half of a form in play takes expression through whatever instances are available, and in the excluding person's experience it appears as not-self, met in others and in scenes, with charge proportional to the exclusion. Completion runs through three ordinary routes. It asserts no teleology: a recurring situation contains an excluded pole; it did not occur in order to complete anything.

Evocation. The first route. A stabilized pattern elicits its complement from others. The person who cannot express need reliably evokes caretaking or its refusal; the person who cannot express anger evokes others' irritation on their behalf. The exclusion shapes the interactional surface, the positions left vacant, which others fill.

Selection. The second route. People participate in constructing the environments that then act on them, and the choosing follows the valve, so the excluded pole takes part in the choice precisely by being excluded. A pattern that holds out dependence selects environments where dependence, when it becomes unavoidable, arrives as crisis.

Interpretation. The third route. Perception arrives configured by the valve, so a pole excluded from expression appears to its bearer as not-self, and the same event reads as neutral to one person and as structurally loaded to another. Turned inward, the same route produces the dream: what the waking pattern holds out takes form as image.

Distribution. Completion within a family or other nested field. The forms the unit addresses spread across its members as coverage, not partition: what one member cannot express, another expresses with disproportionate intensity. A role is not a trait of its holder but a location where a collective exclusion has stabilized, which is why roles reassign when a member leaves. What no member can carry, the unit meets outside its boundary, as not-us. Across generations, a theme is a persisting address, not a transmitted content.

Participation. The model's name for what happens between persons: co-addressing. Both parties draw on one field, so content is co-instantiated, never transmitted. Ordinary channels carry only a selection among forms both can already reach, as a few words of a title suffice between two people who know the same library. People are not isolated; they participate in one another.