The Three Structural Axes of Human Mindedness

The Map of Mind is organized along three orthogonal axes, each doing distinct explanatory work. The vertical axis tracks Ontological and evolutionary complexity through the Tree of Knowledge framework, differentiating the bio-physiological substrate (Mind 1), animal sentience and subjective Consciousness (Mind 2), and the culturally constituted person (Mind 3) as genuinely discontinuous strata rather than scalar gradations. The spatial axis distinguishes overt minded behavior — the animal-environment interface (Mind 1b) — from implicit neurocognitive and semantic processing occurring within the organism (Mind 1a). This inside-outside distinction is precisely what behaviorism collapsed, and recovering it is necessary for any adequate philosophy of mind.

The third axis is epistemological and concerns the vector of knowing. Mind 2, subjective Consciousness, is constituted by an interior Epistemic vector: it arises from the inside out. Science, as an Institution grounded in systematic intersubjective Empiricism, is structurally committed to a third-person, exterior vantage point. This is not a contingent limitation but a defining feature of what scientific knowledge is. The epistemological gap between Propositional knowledge — knowing that — and Perspectival knowledge — knowing what it is like — is real and irreducible. John Vervaeke's distinction between these knowledge types maps directly onto the gap: exhaustive Propositional knowledge of wavelength and neural response cannot substitute for the perspectival fact of seeing red.

By holding all three axes simultaneously, the Map of Mind provides the architecture to locate The hard problem of Consciousness precisely, to explain why it is structurally hard rather than merely technically difficult, and to clarify what kinds of inquiry can and cannot close The explanatory gap.