The Relativity of the Individual Mind

Abstract

For roughly a century, the dominant account of selfhood in psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences has held that the individual self is derivative of the social and narrative field — constituted by it, and possessing no independent standing. This paper does not dispute that account. It proposes instead a change in what is admitted, on the model of the introduction of zero into number: not an argument that the individual mind exists, but an expansion of what consciousness may be taken to include, adopted because the expansion is useful. The paper names the tradition being extended, states the move, and lists the frameworks built from it. The argument is then grounded in a case the traditional model cannot accommodate. Following a traumatic brain injury in 1987 that produced global aphasia undiagnosed for 27 years, alongside undiagnosed synesthetic autism, the author faced a structural bind: standard trauma resolution requires locating experience within a context, context is constituted in language, and the period in question was continuous, meaningful, and non-linguistic. No context could be formed from inside the experience, and none could be supplied from outside, as no comparable case exists from which to infer. Dismissing the period as meaningless was not available; leaving the trauma unresolved was not biologically available. The bind is shown to be structural rather than a failure of technique or of practitioner competence. The proposed expansion — termed Complex Meaning, by analogy to the admission of zero and later of i into the number system — treats individual consciousness as a standing term that is neither derivative of collective meaning nor reducible to it, but relatable to it. The paper follows the consequences of that move, including the result that the set of words whose meaning is constant and identical across persons and time is empty, and reports three domains in which previously intractable problems become tractable: neurodiversity without pathology, trauma resolution without collapse into a shared framework, and archetypal work outside social gatekeeping. A machine-readable JSON encoding of the paper's argument structure is included with this record.