The Locus of Shared Experience

Abstract

What does it mean for two people to share an experience without possessing identical experiences? This addendum extends the contextual experiential-binding proposal from the constitution of individual qualitative episodes to capability, mind attribution, experiential access, and intersubjective participation. Its central claim is that shared experience can be modeled as a higher-order, consequential binding among distinct participants and their encounters, preserving both warranted commonality and intelligible difference. The shared organization is not presumed to be a third phenomenal subject. Six developments organize the argument. First, a cognitive capability is treated as a sustained achievement dependent on organization, constraints, resources, and conditions, rather than on complexity alone. Second, named faculties may compose overlapping formative capacities; the proposal does not posit a single dedicated detector or a specific evolutionary origin. Third, the realization of activity is separated from an observer's attribution of capability or experience. Fourth, experiential access is indexed by distinction, route, conditions, and occasion, avoiding a global ranking of consciousness from a local perceptual limitation. Fifth, semantic correspondence is formalized relative to a comparison contract and representational resolution: shared reference, category agreement, functional correspondence, and phenomenal identity remain different claims. Sixth, interpersonal understanding is distinguished from agreement. A more adequate account of another standpoint can preserve, clarify, or even reveal disagreement rather than eliminate it. The formal development introduces partial semantic projections, resolution refinement, directional perspective bridges, standpoint-tagged difference accounts, and interaction-sensitive encounter records. Elementary propositions show that coarse equivalence need not imply finer equivalence, invariance need not imply truth, synchronized outputs need not imply reciprocal interaction, and predictive understanding need not increase with agreement. Proposed studies distinguish shared component reuse from generic task effects, attribution from target performance, alternative access from identical phenomenology, and contingent interaction from common exposure. The contribution is a source-grounded research architecture for making experiential commonality and difference answerable to inquiry, not a solution by definition to phenomenal identity or the existence of consciousness. Keywords: shared experience; intersubjectivity; semantic binding; formative capability; realization shell; mind attribution; experiential access; co-projection; objectivity; perspective; mutual understanding; difference preservation.