Working note. VMS is an explanatory map for human state-transitions. It separates variables, non-self mechanisms, and the evaluative role of Self while leaving their empirical boundaries and mediation routes open to investigation.
Human situations can be represented as transitions between bundles of variables:
A variable is anything in the state bundle that can change or matter explanatorily. It may be bodily, environmental, social, behavioral, institutional, or reported:
blood glucose or body temperature
neural activity or hormonal state
pain, distress, attention, or motivation
spoken and written self-report
task performance or avoidance
family, school, workplace, and environment
language, law, norm, or institutional rule
diagnostic and policy categories
Variables are not ontologically divided first into “objective” and “subjective.” The more useful distinction concerns provenance and mediation route:
variable
→ where it came from
→ which route produced or transformed it
→ how well that route can be reconstructed
→ what explanatory and practical interpretation is justified
Mechanism is the non-self explanatory space through which variables are transformed, regulated, stabilized, distorted, compensated for, expressed, or changed over time. Attention regulation, memory systems, hormonal processes, bodily control, learned responses, and other psychological functions may participate in a transition. Named functions are often higher-level carvings over overlapping mechanisms rather than single, cleanly bounded objects.
Self enters the map in a different role. It is the explanatory anchor for valuation, identification, endorsement, rejection, care, agency, self-boundary, person-level preference, and welfare-bearing.
Mechanism → transformation, regulation, expression
Self → evaluation, identification, welfare-bearing
The distinction does not imply that Mechanism is unimportant or that Self acts without mechanisms. VMS represents both as participating in transitions, often interactively:
The same observed variable may be generated by different combinations of prior state, world input, Mechanism, and Self. Attention failure might arise from an attention-regulation mechanism, sleep deprivation, motivational conflict, depression, school mismatch, environmental pressure, or several of these together. Distress might express mechanism-level impairment, a hostile environment, conflict within the Self, blocked self-expression, ordinary grief, or the interpretation placed on one of these states.
This is why observing a variable does not settle its source.
Self-report is a variable, not Self.
Self-report is produced through perception, memory, language, interpretation, self-understanding, social learning, strategic presentation, and the current state of the person. It can be essential evidence while remaining mediated.
Self and Mechanism
→ mediation
→ report
report
→ evidence about Self, Mechanism, state, and world
report ≠ direct identity with Self
This avoids two symmetrical errors: treating self-report as noise because it is mediated, and treating it as transparent access because it is first-personal.
Legibility is epistemic.
A variable is more legible when its provenance and mediation route can be reconstructed well enough to support reliable interpretation and action. Legibility is not the same as whether a variable is “objective.” A report can be highly informative; a laboratory value can be misleading if its route or context is misunderstood.
General medicine often appears more legible because fractures, pathogens, infection markers, body temperature, or blood glucose have shorter or better-understood mediation routes and well-developed conversion pathways. Psychiatry often centers on deeply mediated variables such as distress, self-blame, consent, avoidance, attention failure, motivation, impulse, functioning, and self-report. The difference is one of route complexity and reconstructability, not a simple objective/subjective divide.
Psychiatric diagnosis therefore has to reconstruct provenance. A welfare-relevant disturbance may lie primarily in:
prior state or world-input
non-self mechanism
Self
the relation between Self and Mechanism
the interaction of several sources
A label can be inaccurate even when the observed state is real, because the attribution may locate the state at the wrong source, level, or pathway.
Plasticity is conditional and unequal.
Self participates in VMS mediation with some degree of plasticity, but plasticity is not uniform. It depends on the variable type, its mediation route, the degree of Self-involvement, the current state, the mechanism, the person's history, and the particular structure of .
The same social or environmental variable can therefore produce different transitions:
World-state changes often alter state and manifestation more readily than person-level evaluative information. Social interaction can be especially Self-intensive when it routes through trust, attachment, cooperation, blame, education, recognition, judgment, institutional participation, commitment, or self-interpretation. Even then, interaction does not guarantee a change in Deep Self.
Social variables remain variables.
Norms, laws, education, institutional rules, expectations, public discourse, rights language, and policy categories enter individual VMS processes as mediated social variables. They can affect behavior, self-understanding, opportunity, distress, and sometimes person-level evaluation. They are not identical to the deeper evaluative structure they may imperfectly express.
This gives VMS a general operational role:
underlying structure
→ mediated variables and mechanisms
→ observable report, behavior, or state-transition
→ attempted reconstruction of provenance
Its use is not confined to psychiatry. Any human explanation can become confused when a reported output, an institutional category, a mechanism, and the welfare bearer are treated as the same kind of object.
What VMS does not yet settle.
VMS does not prove the existence of a particular Deep Self object, identify its physical realization, or deliver a completed boundary principle. Even under complete biological knowledge, two questions may remain distinct:
What structures and processes exist?
Which part of that structure realizes the agent?
One provisional representation is:
where realizes Self and is non-self Mechanism. In the relevant explanatory geometry, these regions are strictly non-overlapping:
How their boundary is fixed, and whether complete empirical knowledge is sufficient to fix it, remain open.
The immediate payoff of VMS is smaller but still useful: it prevents variables, reports, named functions, underlying mechanisms, environmental inputs, and evaluative bearers from being collapsed into one undifferentiated explanatory category.
references: Sripada's language of deep self and self-expression is close to some of the vocabulary used for the Self side of VMS, especially the possibility that a psychological state may not express the person.