IACSIACSInt'l Academy for Consciousness Studies
Glossary · This school's vocabulary

The C and M Lexicon

C, c, M, m, closure, remainder
DefinitionThe C and M lexicon is the core vocabulary of the framework this academy was founded on. C and c name two grades of consciousness, M and m two grades of openness, and closure and remainder describe how a settled world forms and what it always leaves out. It is a lens the school uses, offered as a wager, not as established science.

The four designators

The framework starts with four primitive terms. Capital C is irreducible presence: the bare fact that experience is occurring at all, the simple sense that something is going on for someone. Lowercase c is localized consciousness: experience filled with content, the ordinary mind of perception, memory, attention, feeling, and agency that neuroscience studies. The claim is not that these are two substances, but two descriptive resolutions of the same presence, one stripped bare, one under everyday constraint.

Capital M is global openness: whatever is not exhausted by any settled description, the world considered as more than any of our accounts of it. Lowercase m is the local horizon: the unspecifiability a particular observer runs into given their limited access and vantage. Roughly, C and c are about presence, while M and m are about what stays open. The lexicon exists so that the framework can talk about presence and openness without collapsing them into each other.

Closure and remainder

Closure is the framework's word for how an open situation settles into a workable world: distinctions get drawn, identities get fixed, and a stable set of rules makes description, inference, and coordinated action possible. The term is borrowed from the philosopher Hilary Lawson, who used closure to describe how openness is held in place long enough to be lived in. A closure is what turns a blur of possibility into a definite this.

Remainder is what any finite closure leaves over: the mismatch between a stabilized account and the openness it was carved from. Every workable description buys its clarity at the cost of leaving something out, and that leftover is not a mistake to be fixed but a structural feature of settling on any account at all. In the framework, remainder shows up everywhere from the limits of language to the open questions of physics, and naming it is half the point of the vocabulary.

How to read this vocabulary

These terms come from the framework Consciousness, Closure, and the Cosmos, developed by CF Dietz, which this academy takes as its founding idea. It is worth being plain about their status. They are a proposed lens, held as a wager rather than a proven theory, and the academy teaches the whole long argument about mind, from Patanjali to Chalmers, including the thinkers who would take this framework apart.

So the lexicon is offered as a way of seeing, not a doctrine to accept. If it earns its keep, it does so by making other debates, about consciousness, meaning, and the limits of knowledge, easier to hold in view, not by settling them. Read it that way: a working vocabulary you are free to pick up, test, and put down.

Sources and further reading

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Related terms

The Closure LadderThe Explanatory GapPanpsychismEmergence

Related questions

Is consciousness fundamental, or does the brain create it?What is consciousness?Why do words never fully capture what we mean?
All terms in the glossary