# Glossary of Key Terms ## Core Terms **[[Phainotaxis]]:** a synthetic meta-philosophical grammar of representation, built from the elemental parameters of experience, designed to map, differentiate, and analyze the structures of knowing, appearing, and meaning **Phainotactic:** structural adjective, refers to the inherent grammar or structure of Phainotaxis **Phainotactical:** applied adjective, refers to the practical or strategic use of Phainotaxis **Proper-Mode (PM):** the individuating or articulatory registers according to which experiences and phenomena of a kind are distinguished (ex. charge is a proper-mode of particles) **Elemental Proper-Modes (EPMs):** the proper-modes of experience itself. The recursive, metacognitive application of PM ontology to the field of representation. These 13 EPMs jointly structure every moment. They are: - **Awareness Texture (Aw):** the felt quality of consciousness itself; the extent to which an experience or representation is clear, dull, focused, or diffuse - **Engagement (Eg):** the depth and character of involvement in experience; the extent to which you are indifferent, immersed, or participating - **Energy (En):** the level of excitation, dynamism, or vitality carried by experience as a totality; the extent to which it feels charged, volatile, turbulent, intense, calm, inert, or depleted - **Affect (Af):** the intensity and valence of mood; the emotional dimension of experience, including pleasure, pain, and other feeling-states - **Perception (Pe):** the manifold of sensory givenness; the intensity of each sense-channel’s activity; each includes a “mind-sense” meta-parameter, indicating how intensely analogous mental representations of those channels are experienced - **Temporal Orientation (Te):** the presence of the experience in time along the axis of past to future; the temporality of a phenomenon as discrete, continuous, or eternal; the pressure of time as urgency or ease - **Spatial Orientation (Sp):** the sensed shape and layout of space; openness, size, distance, rotation, relative position - **Structure (St):** the felt legibility of patterned relation; the extent to which the experience or representation feels orderly, coherent, symmetrical, complex, or fitting, and their opposites - **Possibility (Po):** the felt openness of horizons; the sense that things could unfold otherwise; the extent to which things feel novel or familiar - **Control (Co):** the felt degree of agency; the magnitude and direction of one’s felt sense of influence - **Identity (Id):** the sense of being the center of experience; the degree of identification with what is being experienced - **Value (Va):** the felt gravity of worth and consequence; the extent to which something matters as important, trivial, sacred, forbidden, permissible, urgent, or negligible - **Relationality (Re):** the sense of others’ presence; raw alterity; the detection or lack of other minds; solitude **Experience:** the momentary resolution of reality through the 13 EPMs (the live configuration of PMs at an instant) **Consciousness:** the unifying concept applied when the 13 EPMs are taken together as one configuration. It is not a separate substrate or container **Operator Tendency (OT):** any directionally influential modification of one elemental proper-mode on another, symbolized with abbreviations and arrows **Representation:** the Pe→St Operator Tendency, that is, Perception modifying Structure by being mentally fitted into it. Representation is the culmination of reality’s readiness to be represented **Reality:** the readiness to be represented (not the representation itself) **Representational Modality (RM):** a phenomenological medium or field-regime through which experiential structure becomes representable, stabilizable, and transformable - **Visual:** Shapes, colors, and spatial patterning rendered as image - **Auditory/Musical:** Processed sounds; vibration organized as rhythm, pitch, timbre, and harmony - **Chemical-Sensory:** Diffusion and saturation of scent or taste as pattern of mixture - **Somatic/Kinesthetic:** Motion, posture, and gesture as lived diagram of force; includes the Tactile-Textural as contact and surface felt as density and resistance - **Interoceptive/Visceral:** Inner bodily signals—pulse, breath, pressure—felt as form - **Emotional:** structured affective images that translate mood into recognizable feeling - **Enactive:** doing, performing, and responding as representational act; imagined sequence of complex movements; objects represented as utility - **Social-symbolic:** Roles, norms, and collective codes through which relation becomes meaning - **Verbal-conceptual:** Speech, writing, and idea as structured articulation of sense; includes the Formal/Mathematical as quantity and relation expressed through abstract form - **Cross-modal/Synesthetic:** Fusion or translation of sensory grammars into hybrid experience - **Metaphoric-Imaginal:** Imagination, dream, and symbol through which mind represents its own representations - **Noetic:** directly apprehended conditionality of representation, pure structural relation, admissibility, and abstract coherence reified as experience **Expression:** externalization or “acting out” of a representation; includes involuntary actions as expressions of interoceptive pressures **Meaning:** the resonance between representations according to their structural fit within the mind of a representer; the felt or functional coherence by which one representation comes to signify, echo, imply, or transform another **Perspectival Operator (PO):** a stable configuration of OTs that structures how a representation is regarded. **Perspective:** the sustained application of a set of Perspectival Operators with consistent tunings ## Secondary Terms **Consciousness / Reality relation:** Reality = readiness to be represented. Representation = its culmination. “Consciousness” does no ontological work beyond naming the unified configuration of the 13 EPMs **Body:** the emergent boundary where Perception is claimed by Identity as “mine,” converting difference into owned experience (a claim-boundary inside representation, not a spatial container) **Space:** the coherence-condition imposed on what is not-mine once an identity-boundary exists; the ordered relational topology of the exterior (a structural consequence of exteriority, not a substance or container) **Play:** adoption of ends for the sake of means --- *Note: Phainotaxis is a developing framework. Definitions may be revised as the system matures.*