The "world"

The key to this peculiar structure is that deceptively simple term "world". This is meant to be understood here as purely a construct, internal to the organism itself, a product of a process that unifies the various signals impinging on it, which usually arise as inputs from its environment -- but it's something quite distinct from that environment (or from "reality", whatever that might be taken to mean).

What is that world made out of? We can list some of its phenomenal characteristics:

• Before anything else, the world is defined as a space, centered upon the body of the organism.
• Each sensory channel defines a qualitatively unique set of qualitative states, and each channel wraps the entire world like a sheet or fabric; thus, multiple sensory channels are redundant in terms of the world's "totality" -- they add information, but not completion.
• Signals arriving to consciousness are then mapped to this fabric in such a way that they are given a location in the predefined space of the world, and in this way the signals on various channels can be spatially related to one another (the absence of a signal is itself just a part -- possibly a significant part -- of the fabric)
• Signals on the same channel may be qualitatively distinct, but they can also be blended or merged with one another, to form a kind of spectrum; signals on different channels are inherently distinct.