What is meant by the term territory is any object of study. When Husserl made his maps of consciousness he worked from the territory of the natural attitude of everyday experience to produce the ideal and universal conclusions of chapters 6–9. Pure psychology is map-making in a style of commentaries on consciousness, what it is to be alive. What causes human beings to be, act, feel and relate are different maps of the same territory and needing to respond when in it. The crucial difference is how accurate they are with respect to their territory. The social world is the co-occurrence of nonverbal , verbal and the contents of mass media where face-to-face interactions co-occur and other forms of information about the collective view of what it is to belong to a circle of friends, a family or a professional group. In the case of maps of understanding, they show temporal being concerning what has been, what is now and what might be. When an experience is broken down into its temporal moments, it shows the importance of throwing forward of sense of a wholistic sort, that has the effect of there being an understandable whole. In relation to the past, the sense made of past events is a whole of a different sort. The original temporal field is caught between what has happened and what can be anticipated to come. However, any instance of mapping is an instance of the enworlding synthesis that connects with the cosmos, the all that is the world, and turns it into a specific understandable style of a world that relates to the current territory.

In moving toward any valued outcome there are the necessities and universalities of the space of possibility as that of possible meanings about the future. The vision of looking forwards into future time, as well as understanding what is possible for the here and now, is the purpose of the mathematical style of adopting a universal view. The infinite range of possibilities becomes understandable through the ability to map biopsychosocial emergent forms and patterns within a region of life. A great deal of what the human being deals with does not exist perceptually and so the realm of meaningfulness and motivations about possible forms interact as biopsychosocial influences across time. The individual brain and body change physically to accommodate current influences. The real work is dealing with the decision-making process that governs how to be emotionally and socially intelligent, in how to co-operate and be mutual and reciprocal, while asserting oneself in the most basic way of providing a proper active influence within the current social scene. Everyone deals with hardships, bad luck, and the consequences of bad decisions. What makes the difference is being able to move into self-healing if that is necessary. The complex systems of intersubjectivity, how societies work in a wholistic view of the interacting forces of money, place, persons and other forces built around the communal life, is that societies are found to move between states of order and chaos. Long-lasting civilizations, empires and dicatorships fall. There are cycles of boom and bust yet the dependent moments of the whole of society is the social matrix in which individual consciousness evolves. The habits of mind are reactive to uncertainty and may follow the lines of sense and motivation, away from the bad and towards the good, however conceived. The beliefs that drive society are those that drive the individual.

The developmental psychologist Josef Perner takes Zenon Pylyshyn’s phrase, of the “ability to represent the representing relation itself”, (Pylyshyn 1978, 593), and uses it to show that meta-representation is understanding that something is the case, but that the self-same object could be viewed differently by someone else, or viewed differently by self at some other time. Thus, meta-representation includes: “Explicit understanding… that one and the same representation can have different interpretations”, (Perner 1991a, 102). Or in Husserlian terms that there can be two or more noemata of the same object given in one or more noetic ways, for solo consciousness or two or more people. This is not just a comment on the manifold of the senses that any object can have and how it is possible to identify constant and persistent evidence, because patterns do appear out of multiplicity. Meta-representation is a specific form of theorising that tries to show the temporally and teleologically-oriented view of the decision-making that concerns different ontological views of what is and how it could be otherwise. What Perner is identifying in Pylyshyn’s idea is a warrant to understand consciousness as capable of separately holding differing views of the selfsame object. So, meta-representation expresses how consciousness understands the being of the object by considering the phenomenon of having more than one map of the same object and the ability to connect with them: for instance, holding in mind three different maps of an object in the timeframes past, present and future. Other abilities of consciousness that are meta-representational include comparing the perspectives self and other. The ability to problem-solve and be creative requires altering the specific senses of a whole constellation of self, other and object but keeping the constituent composite elements the same. The unifying continuity is to connect similar situations of an object as-understood, that is further understood from multiple points of view of different persons, or as merely hypothetical possibilities for instance (clearly understood as merely possible and not extant). These options are only a fraction of many more possibilities all of which are meta-representational.

The word “cartography” builds on the previous use of “reflection” and refers to the ability to represent the relation between intentionality and its objects. For instance, how beliefs and habits fit together at an implicit level in automatically and involuntarily creating any understanding and reaction to any situation. Cartography is a metaphorical term that implies the idea that there are specific styles of maps made. Not just of different territories but of specifically different important objects on the same territory. Cartography also implies that simplifications take place in making these understandings, because to keep the use of maps in sight is to note that understandings, mappings, enable actions to be achieved. It includes wanting to explain how there can be different maps of the same territory. For the moment the teaching point is merely noting that the terminology of intentionality, intentional implication , intersubjective intentionality, drive and the representation of objects, presence and the consciousness of others—are the processes of symbolisation, of map-making itself. The map of the world is really a pre-reflexive implicit set of understandings and presences that can be made conscious through a variety of experiences where anticipations can become successful in a pleasant surprise; or thwarted and disappointed. When there is an explicitly conscious realisation of the map, intentional concepts differentiate the now conscious objects and intentionalities, and bring into explicit understanding the related objects and their associated intentionalities. A map that an individual has about the world is held within a set of pre-reflexive presences. Anonymously functioning passive processes do their work to re-present what become objects to consciousness . When the ego reflects, interprets and compares the senses of its objects, it turns a mere presence into an object of attention. Accordingly, map-making about human experience is partly about temporality and the intersubjectivity of distress that might be increasing across areas of a person’s life across time. There are many influences on having a specific style of being in the territory of the world and how to predict what will be in the future but these get simplified in producing a map of them.