I have notes everywhere. I leave very many trails in my pmwiki pages, in this blog, in thousands of whiteboards, and in many other locations (including publications). If one were to trawl them forensically (Lord forbid!) I doubt a coherent picture would emerge. But in re-reading many bits myself, I find I have to understand them in the context of a specific progression of ideas.

About 2005, I became fixated on the concept of the P-world, which was that which was present to an individual at any given moment. My attempts to articulate this ran foul of obviousness and unoriginality, and it must have seemed that I was trying to describe the contents of consciousness, or the like. I suppose I was, but I was trying to tie it to the notion of the present. However I was trapped in an individualistic framework.

About 2009, I think, I reasoned myself into the recognition that the P-world does not exist. It is an explanatory crutch, we rely on for everyday talk of our selves, but it cannot be granted any kind of essence, or real being. It is ontologically vacuous, but narratively important.

About 2017 I hit upon the P-H symbol, the gateless gate, which now informs my thinking. In that view (expanded elsewhere) I distinguished (and currently distinguish) between the unrepresentable ground of being in the present (H) and domains of representation (P). We tell stories about P, for we must represent in our stories. Those stories must lean on some notion of agency, and one way that happens is for us to attribute something like the P-world to the agents in our stories. These are narrative conveniences, which have no reality, beyond helping our stories make sense.

At the same time, I have become interested in the idea that one’s sense of being in one’s own head has its own reasons. I expressed this in my brain-in-the-ass hypothesis. One might even reduce that sense to a single point, at the centre of a subjective coordinate system, pleasingly enough located at or near the pineal gland.

Now I am trying to understand my own existence as having a P-point, but no P-world. Having given up on the notion of individual minds, much of what I formerly interpreted as the P-world is now seen as H, which is not mine, not interior, and not unreal in any sense. But I still need to tell stories, so I look to see if I can shrink the represented P-worlds within the domain of P, that is, can I hypothesise specific minds, or loci of agency, that are no more complex than they need to be, in recognition that such assumptions are untrustworthy.

This all aligns well with Victor’s quip that “a single point cannot be grasped”, which translates as the P-world is vacuous, having no content at all.