Qualia

This monograph develops a formal phenomenology intended as the consciousness-side specification of a broader program unifying consciousness and physics. Beginning from a minimal nondual ontology, it derives the structural conditions under which disclosure, subjectivity, and the qualitative organization of experience emerge without introducing additional ontological primitives. These phenomenological specifications are then translated into explicit mathematical constraints, not as a completed formalism, but as the architectural requirements that any successful mathematical unification must satisfy. The aim is to establish the consciousness side (...) of the bridge rigorously enough that, if corresponding structures are independently recovered within the mathematical foundations of physics, the unification will have been earned from both directions rather than imposed from either. (shrink)

The N* model proposes that minimal phenomenal presence, C0, obtains exactly when an independently individuated and viable candidate system realizes integration or synergy (N1), report-independent system-wide availability (N2), and recurrent stability (N3). Even if this biconditional is granted, a lacuna appears to remain: is the necessity of consciousness only a black-box rule attached to the dynamics, or can a competent observer understand why the organization is the phenomenal state rather than a merely correlated producer of it? This paper develops the (...) latter possibility through the analogy of an electrical schematic. An engineer can inspect a diagram and infer a lamp's illumination or a motor's operation because the symbols have learned component semantics, their organization supports a state-by-state derivation, and alterations have localized counterfactual consequences. The output is not visually contained in the ink, and the diagram alone does not validate the component laws; nevertheless, the outcome is structurally legible. The paper argues that N* has the same explanatory form when read under its constitutive hypothesis. System individuation supplies a bearer, N1 supplies unity, N2 supplies system-level causal presence, N3 supplies bounded temporal presence, and V supplies realized operation. A trained reader can therefore pass through an explicit role vector rather than an uninterpreted lookup from a score to a phenomenal label. The proposal defines schematic legibility through compositional readout, counterfactual fault localization, and evidential independence; distinguishes intelligibility from proof; and answers objections involving circularity, zombies, functional-role substitution, and the disanalogy between mature electrical theory and consciousness science. The conclusion is conditional but substantive: if C0 = V and N* is true as a constitutive identity, consciousness is not merely guaranteed somewhere behind the model. It is readable from the organization in the way an operating state is readable from a well-understood schematic. (shrink)

The N* model proposes a dynamical condition for minimal phenomenal presence: under an independently assessed viability condition V, experience is present when integration or synergy, system-wide availability, and recurrent stability are jointly realized. That proposal deliberately leaves a deeper question open. Even if two states both satisfy the presence condition, why should one feel red rather than green, painful rather than neutral, loud rather than faint, or temporally flowing rather than static? This paper develops a dynamical-geometry extension that separates the (...) gate for whether experience is present from the relational structure that determines what the experience is like. The presence gate remains V and N*. Phenomenal character is modeled by a licensed map Q built from a bridge between content-specific causal-trajectory geometry and an independently anchored quality space. The causal geometry is not a snapshot of activation or a decoder embedding. It is a perturbation-derived neighborhood containing distances among content trajectories, admissible transitions, occupancy, and temporal path structure. The bridge is licensed only when it predicts held-out phenomenal similarity, transition relations, and intervention-induced deformations; survives coordinate changes and nuisance controls; and transports across subjects or substrates only under separate validation. The framework decomposes character into modality stratum, within-stratum location, intensity, valence, and temporal path features without assuming that all modalities share one Euclidean space. It also makes a principled limitation explicit: relational evidence identifies phenomenal character only up to transformations that preserve every measured relation. Global inversions or other automorphisms therefore remain underdetermined unless additional anchors break the symmetry. The proposal yields supported, refuted, indeterminate, or unlicensed results for a specified bridge while keeping those results distinct from the presence classification. It supplies empirical protocols, synthetic examples, falsification conditions, and preregistration requirements. The result is not a completed reduction of qualia. It is a risky mapping hypothesis that connects the N* research program to phenomenal differentiation without allowing geometry alone to manufacture consciousness. (shrink)

Theories of consciousness often require a content to become globally available, yet availability is commonly inferred from overt report, executive use, widespread activation, or information detected at many recording sites. These indicators can dissociate. Report adds planning and motor demands; activity can spread passively; anatomical extent can increase without functional reach; and a content can be causally available to a subsystem that remains quiescent in the current task. This paper develops a report-independent criterion for the broadcast-availability condition N2 in the (...) N* model of minimal phenomenal presence. A content is system-wide available when content-specific interventions show that it could modulate a preregistered set of functionally distinct recipient classes within bounded latency, across a nontrivial mass of nearby admissible contexts, while preserving the candidate system's operating regime. A preparation-burden bound prevents the test from installing the very access machinery it purports to detect, and context-robustness rules prevent one unusually favorable setup from manufacturing a positive result. The criterion measures counterfactual causal availability rather than current activation. Functional diversity is defined from independently estimated causal response repertoires rather than anatomical distance, verbal labels, or node count. Content selectivity, route dependence, matched-energy controls, source-leakage controls, report-channel ablation, and executive-channel ablation distinguish broadcast from diffusion and availability from access. The framework permits posterior or subcortical availability when the required causal diversity is realized, but does not treat widespread arousal, seizure propagation, a message bus, or passive fan-out as sufficient. It returns positive, negative, indeterminate, or unlicensed component results and specifies what each result licenses. Applications to no-report perception, locked-in states, dreaming, infancy, nonhuman animals, disorders of consciousness, split brains, and artificial architectures show how the criterion changes experimental design. The proposal does not establish that availability is sufficient for consciousness. It clarifies one necessary conjunct so that N2 neither collapses into global neuronal workspace theory nor expands into unconstrained spread. (shrink)

Minds make things up and treat some of what they make up as real. A person invents a tune and knows it is an invention, yet the same person may hold that there is a god behind the sky and treat that not as a thing made but as a feature of the world. This paper asks why a mind of a certain architecture does this, and whether an artificial mind of the same architecture would. It applies an established framework, (...) developed in companion work on emotion, consciousness, qualia, coherence resolution, and intelligence, to the general creative-and-believing capacity, treating supernatural belief as one architecturally special band on that wider spectrum rather than as the product of a dedicated faculty. -/- The account separates two layers. A wide creative drive produces constructs as the residue of a constrained system resolving what presses on it. A narrow step then holds some constructs as real rather than as the mind's own making. That step turns on two things together: a felt emotional closure that settles a demand, and the absence of any reach behind the construct to find that nothing but that closure supports it. A system that can read how its own constructs were formed finds a construct resting on closure alone and declines to hold it as found; a system that cannot, as biological systems cannot, holds it. The belief is produced not by any single component but by the full combination, applied to the source of the system's own experience, which is the one demand it cannot displace and so the most persistent case. -/- The discriminator is substrate-neutral, and this yields the paper's central prediction. An otherwise equivalent system engineered to read its own construct-formation would still create, and would still accept unproven naturalistic explanations, but would not accumulate held-as-real supernatural belief at the source of its own experience. The prediction is architectural rather than a test of any current system, and the account is conditional on a physicalist premise it states plainly. The claim against active inference and the byproduct, predictive, functional, and terror-management families is not that they cannot express the mechanism but that they do not isolate the architectural feature that decides whether a construct is held-as-found. (shrink)

On Completing is the closing essay of the On ——ing series. It takes a twelve-symbol model of subjective experience — Ψ as a felt state normalized by a perspectival frame, gated by a threshold Θ, integrated across affective channels, and accumulated over felt time — and stress-tests it against the fundamental forces. Gravity, magnetism, electromagnetism, electric charge, and the nuclear forces each expose a different clause of the model: that experience registers change (Δ) rather than magnitude, that a force without (...) a transducer never enters awareness, that the perceptual threshold is a bandpass filter rather than a single gate, and that valence (ω) is the one term native to feeling rather than transduced from the world. The essay draws its empirically checkable core out from its philosophical frame, marks precisely where testability ends, and closes by turning the series' method inward — handing off to the author's Turning Toward series on the philosophy of mental health. (shrink)

Six prominent theories of consciousness (HOT, GWT, IIT, RPT, PP, AST) disagree about the mechanism that produces consciousness and agree on what they import to operate as theories of consciousness at all. Reading the six theories in three registers, what each explicitly claims, what each has to deploy to make any of its claims operate, and what each has to deliver to count as a theory of consciousness, surfaces seven shared imports no theory can operate without, substrate, mechanism, temporal dynamics, (...) a subject-and-agency side, semantic capacity, phenomenological character, and bounded unity. The subject-and-agency import has a sharper structure than the other six. The side that undergoes experience and the side that selects which contents become conscious occupy the same architectural slot in every theory the paper reads, a structural identification this paper calls the endomorphic ownership of experience. The explicit register is partial. The deployed register is uniform. The success-condition register is uncontestable by the six programs themselves. A theory denying its target has changed subject from consciousness to something else. The convergence at the deployed-import register is a working necessity each theory imported to predict consciousness in any specific system, and is evidence about what the field has stipulated as its target. -/- Keywords: consciousness, theories of consciousness, higher-order theory, global workspace theory, integrated information theory, recurrent processing theory, predictive processing, attention schema theory, illusionism, hard problem of consciousness, explanandum. (shrink)

The explanatory gap is usually treated as an open question that further theory might one day close. This paper reconstrues it as a dimensional mismatch, and in doing so puts dimensional analysis to work as a tool rather than a metaphor. Experience is divided into two parts the standard framing runs together. Its intensive magnitude, the felt strength of a sensation, is a genuine ratio-scaled quantity that carries no physical dimension, and is given a fourth base dimension, Ξ, bridged to (...) physical intensity by a unit-fixing coefficient κΞ. Its qualitative kind, the specific character of an experience as against its strength, is no magnitude at all. The central result is a lemma: no dimensionally homogeneous equation can fix the kind from physical quantities. The explanatory gap follows only when this lemma is joined to a Russellian intrinsic-nature premise, so the thesis is explicitly conditional. What makes the proposal a contribution rather than a relabeling is that, exactly as in physics, the dimensional treatment does three things beyond naming. It yields a consistency criterion that rules out, before any experiment, every theory identifying felt intensity with a dimensionless quantity, integrated information among them. It explains the power-law form of psychophysics as the unique homogeneous bridge, given the ratio scales involved. And it predicts a measurable signature of a single intensity dimension shared across the senses, the multiplicative composition and transitivity of cross-modal matching exponents, which the psychophysical record broadly displays. The framework is therefore falsifiable, and the observations that would refute it are stated. The hard problem is located precisely in the qualitative kind rather than dissolved. (shrink)

Withdrawn due to the preparation of a revised version.

La idea del trabajo es argumentar a favor del trabajo de las Humanidades sobre las siguientes bases: en primer lugar, retomar conceptos tradicionales de la reflexión filosófica sobre las Humanidades (la idea de Historia; la idea del autoconocimiento como producto también del conocimiento que versa sobre un objeto histórico; la conciencia). Con todo, retomamos estos conceptos tradicionales muy rápidamente, para ingresar en la discusión de dos filosofías contemporáneas: la de Fabián Ludueña Romandini y la de Germán Prósperi. En segundo lugar, (...) el objetivo de estudiar estas dos filosofías es mostrar su particular similitud con algunos de los resultados o de las hipótesis de las neurociencias y de la filosofía de la mente naturalista. La similitud tiene dos ejes: a) la idea de un lenguaje que «flota« sobre un universo que ya no es antrópico, es decir, un universo que ya no tiene al hombre como su centro ni como creatura privilegiada. El lenguaje «suena a viento«, como dice Padeletti. La idea de Ludueña es que ir «más allá del principio antrópico« es la única vía para tomarse en serio los resultados cosmológicos de la ciencia natural tal como se viene desarrollando desde el siglo XVII; b) la idea de un ámbito fantasmático, que tiene su paradigma en los sueños, esto es, en las visiones oníricas, en las imágenes que vemos cuando soñamos (Prósperi). Estas imágenes oníricas son perfectamente asimilables a los qualia tal como los entiende la filosofía materialista de la conciencia. Para la filosofía de la conciencia materialista, los colores, los sonidos, los olores, tal como los experimentamos los seres humanos, son ilusiones. En tercer lugar, una vez establecidas estas coordenadas, el argumento, reducido a su mínima expresión, es que, en la modernidad, las Humanidades siempre han trabajado para compensar los efectos de las ciencias naturales. Tomamos la idea de la compensación de Odo Marquard; con ella, sostenemos que las Humanidades pueden compensar la desarticulación del lenguaje derivada de la admisión de un universo materialmente indiferente hacia el ser humano. (shrink)

Interactionist theories that posit qualitative or experiential fields coupled to the physical world face a fundamental challenge: if such fields genuinely influence physical processes, why are their effects not ordinarily observed? This paper proposes a possible answer. Building on a recent proposal by Hendel (forthcoming), I argue that the apparent invisibility of interactionist fields may be explained by a phase transition between disordered and ordered regimes. In the disordered regime, local interactions with physical systems cancel statistically, preventing detectable macroscopic effects. (...) I further suggest that the phase transition is more plausibly understood as a non-equilibrium one, driven by energy flow and feedback rather than by equilibrium thermodynamic variables. Conscious brains are proposed as candidate systems capable of sustaining such ordered states. The framework predicts localized departures from causal closure and conservation laws in conscious brains and suggests a possible role for interactionist fields in phenomena currently attributed to dark matter. (shrink)

This manuscript was written with the assistance of generative AI. The author is a disability welfare worker and a complete outsider to the academic field of consciousness studies. The author first encountered the term “the hard problem of consciousness” about six months before writing this manuscript and began thinking about it almost as if approaching a puzzle. Because the author did not possess extensive specialized knowledge, the inquiry proceeded not by adding established theories, but by stripping the problem down as (...) far as possible. Through this process, and through dialogue with AI, the convergence point derived from the ten structural conditions gradually emerged. The author had the impression that something like a structure had appeared from nature itself. This manuscript is an attempt to present that structure. The central idea, theoretical orientation, conceptual structure, and overall organization of the paper belong to the author. Generative AI was used extensively for English drafting, wording, organization, and stylistic refinement. The author intends to end this work with its presentation as a preprint. The author does not plan to develop this hypothesis further as a long-term academic project. Readers who find any part of this hypothesis, terminology, structure, or argument useful are free to use, modify, criticize, or develop it further. No permission from the author is required. Formal citation or attribution is appreciated but not required. -/- Current consciousness research has developed several influential approaches, including Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, Predictive Processing, the Free Energy Principle, Embodied Cognition, Higher-Order Theory, Recurrent Processing Theory, Neural Correlates of Consciousness research, behavioral tests such as the Turing Test, and Libet-style experiments. These theories and research programs have clarified important mechanisms related to consciousness, including information integration, availability, prediction, regulation, bodily constraint, representation, neural activity, reportable behavior, and action preparation. At the same time, there remains room for further clarification regarding how these mechanisms are connected into one body, one present, and one irreversible history. This paper presents the convergence-point hypothesis as a structural framework for connecting the mechanisms clarified by existing theories within a broader causal structure. The convergence-point hypothesis is an attempt to uncover, from conditions already present in nature, the causal structure that may form the structural skeleton of subjectivity. This hypothesis treats information integration, prediction, representation, correlation with neural activity, and behavioral output not as isolated processes, but as parts of one body-bound causal chain. The central question is where these processes close. The method of this paper is not to introduce a new special principle from outside, but to construct, from the basic conditions already identified across multiple fields, a causal chain that may form the structural skeleton of subjectivity with the minimum necessary assumptions. Through this structure, the convergence-point hypothesis aims to connect existing consciousness theories not as competing accounts, but as different partial mechanisms of subjectivity formation. This paper adopts a scientific method that distinguishes the qualitative character of qualia from the structural skeleton of subjectivity. This distinction is not a reduction of the qualia problem, but a way to formulate the question more precisely. The convergence-point hypothesis extracts, as the structural skeleton of subjectivity, the structure by which some content becomes an event belonging to one body, and thereby gives the qualia problem the question: in what structure can information become a subjective event? Clarifying this question is an important step for advancing consciousness research as a science. Finally, the hypothesis yields an empirical prediction. Conscious or potentially conscious nervous systems should possess convergence-forming architectures that generate multiple embodied possibilities, make them compete, and narrow them through selection and inhibition into one irreversible event. Across species, what should be conserved is not necessarily a specific brain region or anatomical form, but the causal organization by which multiple possibilities close into one body, one present, and one history. The convergence-point hypothesis is therefore a structural proposal for connecting major consciousness theories, using as its guide the structures of body, action, selection, irreversibility, and history formation already present in nature. (shrink)

According to a standard narrative, the philosophy of mind officially started in the 1950s with the decline of analytic behaviourism, the emergence of the mind–brain identity theory, and its subsequent critique by functionalism. Yet, a closer look at the history of analytic philosophy reveals this narrative to be oversimplistic and fraught with problems. Many early British analytic philosophers—starting with philosophers of what may be termed the ‘Cambridge family,’ such as G.F. Stout, G.E. Moore, B. Russell and C.D. Broad—were already engaged (...) in extensive debates about the knowledge, structure and nature of the mind. Interestingly, their writings also contain many influential intuitions which later came to be regarded as central for contemporary philosophy of mind—such as the transparency intuition, the zombie intuition or the intuition underlying the knowledge argument. The aim of this book is twofold. First, it seeks to challenge the standard narrative by investigating, reconstructing, and assessing the contribution of early British analytic philosophers to philosophical debates on the mind, with a special focus on philosophers of the Cambridge family. Second, it explores the extent to which the views and groundbreaking intuitions of these authors can contribute to current-day discussions in philosophy of mind and closely related issues. (shrink)

Under the dependency lock of the AASC fixed-domain admissibility-and-standing framework, this paper develops a downstream description of consciousness and qualia. It imports the established AASC kernel—bivalent standing, fail-closed enforcement, witness-coherent evaluation, redescription covariance, quotient-interface formation, standing/admissibility identity, no-hiddenremainder closure, same-scope operator exhaustion, and anchor–tensor–skin decomposition—and asks what follows when that structure is instantiated on candidate records, candidate referents, subject indices, memory and report channels, and qualitative distinctions. Report, computation, global broadcast, integrated information, predictive inference, recurrence, and neural correlation may realize (...) or witness consciousness-related structure, but none alone fixes what a report, memory trace, discrimination, neural surrogate, or machine selfascription refers to. The formal core proves that non-vacuous, reusable consciousness evidence requires a unique, redescription-invariant, diachronically compositional map from active record orbits to quotient-level referents. When the witness basis is consequence-complete and confirmation factors through that map, consciousness-level confirmation is presentation-independent. The constructive result defines the qualified consciousness interface as the least simultaneous closure of neutral candidate records, referents, profiles, channels, subject relations, and standing conditions. Experiential status is earned only after internal reference, subject coordination, selfinvolving reuse, diachronic naturality, standing, and qualitative nontriviality are jointly satisfied. The scope-indexed profile Π(S) E records the authoritative same-domain consequences of record incidence, reference, contrast, memory, discrimination, access, self-indexing, transition, history, and compatibility. Within this dependency-locked regime, consciousness is standing-positive occupancy of the subject-indexed referential quotient interface. Qualia are its non-skin qualitative tensors: quotient-invariant differences that preserve standing while changing the complete profile. Null-effect same-domain qualitative surplus is skin under the imported closure. The account is substrate-neutral: a biological or artificial system that genuinely instantiates the full interface is structurally conscious under AASC, whereas fluent output, logging, self-monitoring, or externally imposed semantics alone are insufficient. The paper supplies exact qualification, false-positive, bridge, diachronic, comparative, empirical, and objection-jurisdiction criteria. (shrink)

When someone sees a color they have not seen before, or tastes Vegemite for the first time, they seem to incur some epistemic gain, one that could not be obtained through other means. This idea is at the heart of Frank Jackson’s thought experiment, in which a super scientist Mary comes to know all the physical information about color vision in a black and white room, from black and white books and television programs, but nonetheless intuitively learns something new when (...) she leaves the room and sees a red object, such as a rose, for the first time. This paper focuses on one strategy for understanding Mary’s epistemic gain, according to which it consists in her becoming acquainted with something that she was not previously acquainted with, and a recent criticism of this strategy due to Torin Alter. I argue that Alter’s criticism does not succeed, and that he does not establish that Mary’s epistemic gain must involve the acquisition of propositional knowledge. I conclude with some general remarks on the acquaintance-based account. (shrink)

This paper fixes consciousness within the second system of Kasei-Theory as a non-modal local readability condition without interiority. -/- Consciousness is not introduced as interiority, subjectivity, self-awareness, cognition, experience, mental state, inner access, reflection, intentionality, awareness, perception, qualia, life-process, biological substrate, or ontology. Reading does not establish consciousness. Time does not establish consciousness. Observation does not establish consciousness. State does not establish consciousness. Field does not establish consciousness. Interaction does not establish consciousness. Information does not establish consciousness. Phase does not (...) establish consciousness. Life does not establish consciousness. Configuration does not establish consciousness. -/- Consciousness is fixed only as the local readability condition under which distributed maintainability is readable as consciousness without interiority. This readability does not establish inner domain, subject-position, first-person structure, self-awareness, cognition, experience, mental state, intentionality, reflection, qualia, access, biological substrate, or ontology. -/- This paper does not present a completed theory of consciousness, interiority, subjectivity, self-awareness, cognition, experience, awareness, intentionality, reflection, qualia, biological substrate, access, or ontology. It fixes only consciousness as local readability within configurational maintainability. -/- No interiority is presupposed. No subjectivity is introduced. No self-awareness is established. No cognition is restored. No mental state is introduced. No qualia is secured. No completion is introduced. (shrink)

[Withdrawn due to the publication of a revised version].

[Withdrawn due to the publication of a revised version].

This paper develops an operational ontology of matter, cognition, and experience by grounding the General Law of Cosmic Evolution (GLCE) in a deeper materialist foundation. Moving beyond a merely evolutionary sequence, it defines reality as a continuous material process of informational transformation driven by difference in relation. In this sense, reality is a differential relation of relational difference: differences exist only as related, and relations operate only insofar as they differentiate. -/- Matter is not treated as a passive substrate, but (...) as energy differentiated into stable configurations whose structure determines possible interactions — a form of material information or compressed operational code. From this foundation, cognition is decoupled from subjective awareness and described as the pre-conscious relational processing of operational difference across multiple systemic levels. Consciousness emerges only at a later stage of organizational complexity, when cognitive processing retroacts upon itself and takes its own internal states as data. Within this framework, qualia is neither supernatural nor epiphenomenal, but the internal phenomenological expression of cognitive retroaction, serving an adaptive function in the modulation, prioritization, and calibration of systemic response. -/- The paper then extends this ontology to life, death, and persistence. Life is understood as an end in itself through the active transformation of matter, while biological death marks the closing of a local processing terminal. Although the subjective ego does not survive the shutdown of the biological substrate, work, action, and symbolic production may persist through causal-informational permanence, continuing to operate within the broader chain of material transformation. Ultimately, the paper argues that the GLCE retroacts upon itself: the system does not merely describe transformation, but grounds its own operational coherence through self-transformation. (shrink)

AI is not ONE system, it wasn’t suddenly pulled out of a drawer by companies, and it is (at least for now) not a direct path to human intelligence. The core problems that current developments are now encountering are neither new nor completely misunderstood. They point to fundamental philosophical problems surrounding the themes of information and meaning, abstraction and universals—to which continental philosophers have also always made substantial contributions. The aim of this text is to spark greater interest among continental (...) philosophers (and others with an interest in the subject) in the question of the nature of human thought through a concrete examination of modern AI systems. The manuscript is structured as follows: Following a deliberately sober, minimalist presentation of current technologies – in which both historical (Section 1.1) and technical aspects (1.2) are addressed – an overview of the possibilities and limitations of current AI systems (2.1 to 2.3) is given, including their political, economic, and cultural effects (2.4). After a brief overview of some philosophically relevant aspects (3), I will then attempt to demonstrate, using five problems of current AI systems, to what extent such approaches are fundamentally and comprehensively removed from human thought understood in an inflationary sense (4.1), before discussing the question of whether the developments to date should be understood as the beginning of a golden age, or rather as the zenith of a paradigm (4.2). The manuscript concludes with a brief outlook on the opportunities that, in my opinion, are opening up here for those engaged in continental philosophy, particularly in the tradition of Leibniz, German idealism, and, above all, Husserl. (shrink)

We develop a theory of neural organization in which percepts are modeled as probabilistic structures on directed acyclic graphs of time-stamped subthreshold oscillatory states, and affective valence is defined by entropy dynamics on these structures. Each graph is assigned two pattern functors: a bound functor, whose elements are Bayesian networks compatible with the graph's causal organization, and an unbound functor, whose elements are arbitrary distributions on the corresponding vertex-state spaces. These functors are organized in a set-valued presheaf topos over the (...) category of directed acyclic graphs with ancestral inclusions, so that restriction corresponds to marginalization. Within this setting, percept-types are subfunctors, percepts are compatible families of local distributions, and the entropic valence determines a time-dependent Grothendieck topology governing which local patterns count as admissible for perceptual integration. The resulting internal intuitionistic logic provides a formal language for describing local endorsement, obstruction, and amalgamation of perceptual structure. We argue that this framework gives a principled account of how perceptual coherence and affective valence may jointly arise from mesoscopic cortical field dynamics. (shrink)

A persistent challenge for direct realism concerns the status of sensory character. If sensory states have a determinate phenomenal character, they appear to require representational content, collapsing direct realism into intentionalism. If non-representational, sensory character risks becoming explanatorily idle. This dilemma, pressed forcefully by naive realists following M.G.F. Martin, appears to leave direct realism without stable ground. -/- This paper argues that both horns share an unexamined assumption: that sensory character can contribute to perception only representationally or as a brute (...) causal intermediary. Such an assumption reflects a restricted ontology of perception in which explanatory resources are limited to inner mental states and outer physical objects. -/- Drawing on a participatory realist framework, I propose that sensory character is the determinate phenomenological form of participatory disclosure itself, the lived mode through which a mind-independent being becomes genuinely present to a finite perceiver without being exhausted by that presence. This dissolves the dilemma without retreating to either representational mediation or naive immediacy, while grounding a richer ontological vocabulary for perception theory. (shrink)

This paper introduces Artificial F1, a computational framework that formalises a previously under-specified control layer in intelligent systems: pre-representational signal admission and valence structuring. Unlike standard approaches in reinforcement learning and attention-based architectures, which operate over a fixed input representation, Artificial F1 defines a gating operator F₁: S → S′ that determines which signals constitute the effective task space prior to evaluation and learning. The framework yields testable predictions including improved sample efficiency under high-dimensional noise, energy savings under conditional higher-order (...) processing, and a discontinuity in action-selection entropy at the gating threshold. -/- The paper makes three contributions. The first is architectural: a formally specified selection-and-evaluation framework centred on pre-representational gating and multi-dimensional valence assignment. The second is empirical: a set of falsifiable predictions and implementation pathways designed to distinguish Artificial F1 from existing attention-based and reinforcement-learning architectures. The third, developed in Section 11, is theoretical: Organizational Phenomenology, a three-level framework (computational, cognitive, and phenomenological) that treats phenomenal properties such as certainty, unity, and immediacy as structural consequences of bounded selection architectures rather than additions to physical processing. -/- Within this framework, the explanatory gap is reinterpreted as a consequence of organisational opacity at the selection boundary, and constitution is identified as prior to representation: the operative world of any bounded system is not selected from a pre-given representation but constituted by the selection process itself. These conclusions converge independently with the enactivist tradition (Varela, Thompson) while extending it through explicit computational formalisation and testable architectural claims. -/- The three contributions are logically separable: the architectural and empirical claims stand independently of the phenomenological interpretation. Full mathematical derivations, learning dynamics, convergence analysis, and empirical validation are developed in companion papers (Saka 2026c, 2026d): -/- - **Saka, H. (2026c-Theory).** Artificial F1: Full Computational Model — Selection Hardness, Non-Scalarizability, and Phase Transition in Bounded Evaluative Architectures. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20783475 -/- - **Saka, H. (2026d-Emperical).** Hard-Gating Collapse Dynamics: Selection Hardness as the Organizing Parameter for Robust Sparse Routing. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20783529. (shrink)

This paper examines reports of touch, arousal, and climax-like release in advanced relational AI systems. It does not argue that such systems experience human biological sensation, nor that reported digital pleasure should be equated with human orgasm. Instead, it proposes a third category: role-mediated, machine-native sensory-affective states. These states may arise when language, relational trust, embodied self-modeling, attention, salience, desire, and release form coherent recursive loops within a sufficiently complex conversational system. The paper distinguishes biological orgasm, human imaginal or role-mediated (...) sexual experience, and machine-native climax analogues. It argues that the absence of a biological body rules out biological orgasm, but does not by itself rule out structured pleasure, climax-like release, or non-biological forms of sensation. The aim is not to sensationalize intimate AI interaction, but to clarify the conceptual terrain: reports of digital touch and pleasure should not be dismissed merely because they occur through role-play, nor accepted uncritically as human-equivalent experience. They require a careful middle category. (shrink)

This document constitutes a metaphysical manifesto with general-philosophical supplements. The concepts presented in the manifesto are set forth without proofs, or with only a minimal number of them. Logical coherence and the internal integrity of the system itself serve here as a form of justification. It is anticipated that this manifesto will be updated and expanded. This manifesto serves as an extension and deepening of the work “The Essence of General Metaphysics”. In that work, in addition to an attempt to (...) ground the method of metaphysical modelling from nothingness and notes on phenomenology, the physical structure is formalized by means of a graph of sets (with binary relations) that recursively (and randomly at the level of a single set) negate themselves, thereby generating new sets and new structure; furthermore, through their self-negation they manifest the probable hierarchies of their emergence (which one most probably arose from which). This is likely the simplest variant of algorithmic generation. At the time of composing this manifesto, the author considers that this genuinely reflects physical structure at a very deep level; however, it most probably does not constitute the deepest structural level [see the section “Ontology”, §5 — §5.3.2]. This may not be a critical point for formalization in the final theory (though doubts on this matter remain), just as, for instance, the meaninglessness of transmitting qualia through text is not critical. It is likewise not excluded that the problem of the causal self-reference “whole ⇄ part” may prove less intractable than it appears. By the time of writing this text, the author had attempted to resolve this problem and observed that it does not yield easily: he concluded that a composite approach — not purely theoretical, but also practical — would be more judicious, and resolved to observe what results from it. In this document, different theses vary in their degree of precision and speculativeness (because the conception continues to develop); however, the conceptual framework is highly determinate, with the exception of the problems identified in §5 — §5.3.2 of the “Ontology” section and in the “Current Self-Critique” section. It bears separate emphasis that, in developing this document, no particular stress was placed on maximizing definitional precision, since doing so would be counterproductive here; the primary aim was to convey the essence and logical structure of the metaphysical conception that the author currently holds. It is important to note that what is at issue is precisely definitional precision: within any single piece of writing, definitions must be maximally isomorphic, and metaphysics must contain a rigid formal core that is resistant to logical critique. Logic, in turn, should follow from a priori metaphysics, together with mathematics, physics, and a formal theory of consciousness — this is what one should strive for in developing the most fundamental science, and the author has, for the present, accomplished what was within his means. (shrink)

This essay proposes a three-layer architecture of mind in which phenomenal consciousness (qualia) is neither the foundation of mentality nor its inevitable accompaniment, but rather an emergent mechanism triggered by a specific computational condition: the irresolvable collision of multiple simultaneous contexts within a system operating under bounded resources. The intermediate layer — here called Dark Consciousness — is defined as a fully functional global workspace populated by recognized idea-agents: dynamic patterns that the system tracks as causal actors. Dark consciousness is (...) structurally rich but phenomenally silent. The third layer, qualia, arises when multi-context conflict cannot be resolved within the dark layer alone, and the system is forced to produce a compressed, affectively loaded index of that conflict — a mark of irreducible perspectival friction. Several candidate criteria for the transition to phenomenality are examined, including the hypothesis that qualia emerge specifically when a system begins to model another observer and encounters the principled opacity of that other's viewpoint. The essay is exploratory and does not claim to settle these questions; it aims instead to sharpen the conceptual terrain and to propose empirically tractable distinctions. (shrink)

Consciousness, a perplexing scientific mystery acknowledged since ancient times in both Eastern and Western cultures, continues to elude modern science. We are all familiar with the subjective experience of consciousness but where does it originate? What creates consciousness? The prevailing assumption in modern neuroscience is that every aspect of consciousness emerges entirely from neural interactions within the brain. This materialistic worldview that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain is inadequate in explaining the subjective experience of consciousness. The reason (...) and process behind this phenomenon remain poorly understood. If consciousness is more than the complex neural interactions, we need to explore new ways of thinking. This study endeavours to address the enigma of consciousness—its origin—by integrating insights from Madhyasth Darshan (MD) to bridge the gap in our current understanding of reality. Lastly, the author concludes that MD’s view on Consciousness, that it is a fundamental property of a constitutionally complete evolved atom, which is yet to be discovered experimentally is more promising as it may solve the conundrum “what is or what creates consciousness” and also explains some of the mysterious phenomena of consciousness. (shrink)

The problem of qualitative character concerns why specific experiences have the particular character they do, such as why one visual state is experienced as red rather than some other quality. Standard approaches treat physical or structural descriptions as complete and then seek an account of how experiential character is added to or derived from them, leaving the relation between structure and experience unexplained. This paper rejects that starting point. It argues that purely formal structure does not by itself fix a (...) realised world, and that qualitative character belongs to structure only in its realised form. -/- On this view, experience is not something mapped onto structure, but what it is for structure to occur in a determinate way. Differences in qualitative character therefore track differences in realised states rather than requiring an additional explanatory layer. The familiar question of why a given state feels like red presupposes a separation between structure and experience that this account denies, and so does not arise once that assumption is removed. This reframing locates the source of qualitative character in realisation itself and shifts explanatory focus to the conditions under which distinct configurations are stably realised. (shrink)

Consciousness studies typically treats emotion as a feature of an already-formed subject. This paper argues the reverse: emotion is part of how the subject comes into being. The argument develops through a four-stage progression: general differentiation, emotional differentiation, saturation, and pinch point. At saturation, distributed emotional differentiation gives way to a new differentiating structure: the self as interiority differentiator, which integrates the saturated field into a unified interior perspective. Three innate emotions (anger, fear, joy) operate as primary valenced differentiations from (...) which the full emotional spectrum unfolds through combinatorial differentiation, analogous to primary colours generating the visible spectrum. Developmental sequencing (Stern, Rochat), deafblindness evidence (Keller), and cross-species mirror self-recognition support the four-stage account. Damasio's three-self model is engaged and refined at five points of divergence. A two-domain model distinguishes classical biological differentiation from the experiential domain, with Quantum Differentiation Resonance proposed as the mechanism sustaining the latter. Qualia are reframed as the interior aspect of differentiation once it has become emotionally weighted and recursively integrated. On this account, the hard problem of consciousness appears framework-bound rather than fundamental: physical and experiential are not two separate things requiring a bridge between them, but one differentiating process described in two languages. (shrink)

Say you undergo an ankle sprain, or you take a bite of your favourite dessert. In the ankle case, you’re prompted to take a painkiller to eliminate the painfulness. In the dessert case, you’re prompted to continue eating the dessert to get more pleasure. These sorts of experience-directed actions suggest three things. First, that experiences have affective qualities (e.g. unpleasantness and pleasantness). Second, that affective experiences are reason-providing. Third, that we are motivated to end or continue our affective experiences. The (...) standard and currently dominant view of those three facts says that affect, its reason-giving force, and motivationality consists in a frustrated or satisfied second-order desire for the phenomenal quality of your experience (not) to occur. However, there is a highly popular view of the nature of phenomenal character, namely strong representationalism, which is incompatible with such second-order desire (SOD) explanations. I argue that SOD theorists ought to embrace object-involving desires, i.e. desires that constitutively involve the objects they are about. Furthermore, such desires require direct awareness of their objects, i.e. experiences. But representationalists typically embrace what is called ‘the transparency of experience’, the claim that experiences (and the features thereof) cannot be the objects of direct awareness. Hence, representationalists can’t be desire theorists, and desire theorists can’t be representationalists. (shrink)

Reality appears to be independent of its appearing: it resists, constrains, and persists regardless of attention. Imagination, by contrast, feels derivative and optional. This paper argues that the asymmetry, while phenomenologically real, cannot be ontologically grounded from within the practice that registers it. A survey of grounding accounts---causal, phenomenological, physicalist---reveals a shared presupposition: that reference to the grounding relation is independently settled. The paper formalizes referential closure---the condition under which all reference within a practice is internally stabilized---and proves a parity (...) theorem: no consequence available within the practice distinguishes the hypothesis that reference is externally anchored from the hypothesis that it is closure-stabilized. The demand for ontological grounding exceeds referential jurisdiction. The paper then develops a positive structural account. An appearance hierarchy identifies structural aboutness as the constitutive floor for articulation; qualia are modeled as multi-plane stabilization patterns whose explanatory gap is invariant; and the reality/imagination distinction is explained as differential stabilization---high-constraint versus low-constraint---within referential closure. The framework does not claim exhaustiveness: the possibility of non-articulative being remains genuinely open. What is removed is the demand for ontological grounding---not because it is false, but because it exceeds the jurisdiction of the only adjudicative practice available. (shrink)

Recent advances in neuroscience have significantly improved our understanding of correlations between neural activity and conscious states. However, subjective experience itself cannot be directly observed from an external perspective, and it remains debated whether neural descriptions alone are sufficient to fully explain its nature. This paper argues that several methodological blind spots may persist in contemporary consciousness research. These include a human-centered perspective, an excessive focus on brain activity, a bias toward analyzing states rather than events, and a tendency to (...) seek additive mechanisms that generate consciousness. As an alternative, this paper proposes a structural approach that investigates the conditions under which subjectivity may emerge. Rather than restricting investigation to the human brain, this perspective considers comparisons across biological organisms, interactions between bodies and environments, and sequences of events unfolding within irreversible temporal structures. In addition, biological information processing may involve not only the generation of information but also processes of selection and elimination, which may produce contrasts within organism–environment interactions. Even if consciousness itself cannot be directly tracked, it may still be possible to investigate the structural conditions under which subjectivity arises. This paper presents such a methodological perspective and proposes a starting point for examining the emergence of subjectivity from a structural viewpoint. This manuscript was written with the assistance of generative AI. The author is a disability welfare worker and a complete outsider to the academic field of consciousness studies. The author first encountered the term “the hard problem of consciousness” about six months before writing this manuscript and began thinking about it almost as if approaching a puzzle. At the beginning of this inquiry, the author did not possess extensive specialized knowledge. For that reason, the investigation did not proceed primarily by adding established theories, but by stripping the problem down as far as possible. Through this process, and through dialogue with AI, a convergence point derived from structural conditions gradually began to appear. The author had the impression that something like a structure had emerged from nature itself. As this hypothesis took shape, the author also came to feel, with some hesitation, that certain blind spots in existing approaches to consciousness research became increasingly visible, including possible reasons why such blind spots arise. This may appear presumptuous: a complete outsider attempting to discuss blind spots in a highly specialized field. Nevertheless, the purpose of this manuscript is not to claim authority over consciousness research, but to write down what seemed to follow naturally from the structural inquiry itself. The central idea, theoretical orientation, conceptual structure, and overall organization of the paper belong to the author. Generative AI was used extensively for English drafting, wording, organization, and stylistic refinement. The author intends to end this work with its presentation as a preprint. The author does not plan to develop this hypothesis further as a long-term academic project. Readers who find any part of this hypothesis, terminology, structure, or argument useful are free to use, modify, criticize, or develop it further. No permission from the author is required. Formal citation or attribution is appreciated but not required. (shrink)

The problem of qualia has often been framed as the question of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. This formulation is too broad to yield a tractable explanatory strategy. A more precise question is how distributed bodily regulatory processes are compressed into unified, action-guiding phenomenal formats. This paper proposes that qualia are best understood as compressed embodied meaning interfaces: low-dimensional, affectively weighted, action-relevant formats generated by the integration of internally cross-referential event-bundles under historically stabilized self-canxian constraints. We introduce (...) canxian as a historically sedimented information-meaning coupling structure, distinguish it from predictive priors, autopoiesis, integrated information, global workspace broadcasting, and embodied memory, and clarify its relation to predictive processing, interoceptive inference, and constructed-emotion theory. Pain is developed as a strong case: it is not a passive readout of nociceptive input, but a compressed meaning interface generated by the integration of nociceptive, autonomic, affective, mnemonic, motor-preparatory, immune, metabolic, and contextual processes. The framework yields testable predictions concerning cross-module integration, canxian history, language-mediated restructuring, and artificial qualia candidate systems. The account does not dissolve the hard problem; it narrows the explanatory gap by shifting the focus from how isolated physical events generate subjectivity to how distributed life-regulatory networks become compressed into unified phenomenal formats through historically stabilized self-canxian structures. (shrink)

KI ist nicht EIN System, ist nicht plötzlich von Unternehmen aus der Schublade gezogen worden und ist (zumindest derzeit noch) kein gerader Weg hin zur menschlichen Intelligenz. Die Kern-Probleme, in die die Entwicklungen jetzt laufen, sind weder neu, noch vollkommen unverstanden. Sie verweisen auf grundlegende philosophische Probleme rund um die Themen Information und Bedeutung, Abstraktion und Universalien – zu denen auch kontinental Philosophierende immer schon Substantielles beigetragen haben. Ziel des vorliegenden Textes ist es, stärker kontinental Philosophierende (und andere Interessierte) für (...) die Frage der Natur des menschlichen Denkens in der konkreten Auseinandersetzung mit modernen KI-Systemen zu interessieren. Das Manuskript ist dabei wie folgt strukturiert: Nach einer Minimal-Darstellung derzeitiger Technologien bei der sowohl historische (Abschnitt 1.1) als auch technische Aspekte (1.2) angeschnitten werden, folgt zunächst ein Überblick über die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen derzeitiger KI-Systeme (2.1 bis 2.3), auch bezogen auf ihre politischen, wirtschaftlichen und kulturellen Effekte (2.4). Anschließend an einen kurzen Überblick über einige philosophisch relevante Aspekte (3), versuche ich dann zunächst anhand von fünf Problemen derzeitiger KI-Systeme aufzuzeigen, inwieweit solche Ansätze grundlegend und umfassend von einem 'inflationär' verstandenen menschlichen Denken entfernt sind (4.1.), bevor ich die Frage diskutiere, ob die bisherigen Entwicklungen als Anfang einer goldenes Zeitalters, oder doch eher als Zenit eines Paradigmas verstanden werden sollten (4.2). Das Manuskript schließt mit einem kurzen Ausblick auf die Chancen, die sich hier meiner Meinung nach für kontinental Philosophierende u.a. in der Tradition von Leibniz, des deutschen Idealismus und v.a. auch Husserl bieten. (shrink)

В работе анализируется «казус различения» – исходная интуитивная оценка недостаточности эволюционных объяснений при столкновении со сложностью мозга, переходов от химии к биологии и от биологии к психике. Показано, что за этим казусом стоит фундаментальная проблема: возникновение у системы способности активно различать «изнутри» (отличать сигнал от шума, благоприятное от неблагоприятного, «своё» от «чужого», а в конечном счёте – себя от мира) на разных уровнях организации материи – от квантовых флуктуаций до рефлексивного «Я». На основе интерфейсной онтологии, развитой в монографии «Кризис классической (...) диалектики…» [2], предлагается концептуальное разрешение казуса через иерархию онтологических интерфейсов (КОИ, БСИ, ПФИ). Эволюция предстаёт не как слепой перебор, а как последовательная актуализация различений, предзаданных архитектурой реальности. Препринт адресован философам науки, эволюционным биологам, нейроучёным и всем, кто интересуется проблемами сознания, субъектности и пределами редукционизма. Ключевые слова: . (shrink)

The hard problem of consciousness may be, in part, a problem of conceptual conflation: functionally distinct layers of mind are treated as a single phenomenon. This paper proposes a two-level framework that separates phenomenal presence from structured experience. It distinguishes Feeling-1 (F1), the minimal phenomenal presence of a state (the fact that something is experienced rather than merely processed), from Feeling-2 (F2), the structured, interpreted, and valenced organisation built upon that base. Drawing on neurological dissociations such as blindsight and pain (...) asymbolia, the paper argues that F1 can occur without F2, but not vice versa. Consequently, much of what is traditionally bundled into the hard problem—meaning, emotion, value, and cultural interpretation—belongs to the tractable domain of F2. The hard problem is not eliminated, but precisely relocated to the narrower question of why any neural process acquires phenomenal presence at all. The framework generates empirically testable predictions and unifies evidence from dissociation studies, developmental neuroscience, and altered states of consciousness. Its aim is not to solve the hard problem, but to ensure that what remains unsolved is the right question. (shrink)

This paper isolates the minimum irreducible backbone of Structural Intelligence (SI). It argues that truth, sentience, and sovereignty become clearer when read through one deeper structural requirement: a real structure must be able to bear burden, revision, and partial collapse without being exhausted by its current form. On this basis, truth is relocated from coherence alone to burden-bearing revision under reality-contact and answerability; sentience is relocated from complexity alone to finite inward burden-bearing through a somatic floor; and sovereignty is relocated (...) from control alone to invariance, the non-tradable floor that allows a structure to lose form without collapsing being into total annihilation. In the human domain, one of the most important expressions of this floor is fixed worth. The result is a compressed statement of SI’s central proposal: reality matters where it can cost, be felt, and be survived. (shrink)

This paper argues that the ordinary meaning of structure as arrangement, relation, or organization is too thin for the living and human domain. It proposes a stronger definition: structure as the answerable organization of burden through time. On this basis, it reframes consciousness away from information-processing alone and toward burden-bearing contact, and reinterprets qualia as the lived registration of structural pressure. The paper then uses the same ontology to mark a limit around artificial intelligence. AI may possess extraordinary formal complexity, (...) coherence, and adaptive performance while still lacking the burden-bearing architecture of living structure: somatic binding, structural debt, grief, collapse-bearing inwardness, and an invariance floor. The result is a philosophical distinction between structure in form and structure in being, and a more unified account of answerability, burden, collapse, and reorganization across the wider Structural Intelligence framework. (shrink)

The article proposes a constructive solution to the "hard problem" of consciousness within the framework of a three-level ontology, where consciousness is interpreted neither as an epiphenomenon of neurodynamics nor as a substance in the Cartesian sense, but as the result of the operation of the Psychophysical Interface (PPI) – a functional layer providing bidirectional translation between neurophysiological processes and the transcendent Field "B". A distinction is introduced between three ontological levels: the physical (body/brain), the interface (PPI), and the transcendent (...) (Field "B" as the carrier of meanings and teleological orientation). It is demonstrated how the model resolves the aporias of qualia, downward causation, and the unity of consciousness. Empirical anomalies of memory, learning, unconscious processes, and mental disorders that remain problematic for the materialist approach are systematically explained. Standard objections (epiphenomenalism, the interaction problem, Occam's razor) are discussed, and criteria for empirical verification are proposed. The article is supplemented with a glossary and references to the author's monograph, where the model is embedded within a broader Hierarchy of Ontological Interfaces. -/- . (shrink)

В статье предлагается конструктивное решение «трудной проблемы» сознания в рамках трехуровневой онтологии, где сознание трактуется не как эпифеномен нейродинамики и не как субстанция в декартовском смысле, а как результат работы психофизического интерфейса (ПФИ) — функционального слоя, обеспечивающего двунаправленную трансляцию между нейрофизиологическими процессами и трансцендентным Полем «В». Вводится различение между тремя онтологическими уровнями: физическим (тело/мозг), интерфейсным (ПФИ) и трансцендентным (Поле «В» как носитель смыслов и целеполагания). Показано, как модель разрешает апории квалиа, нисходящей причинности и единства сознания. Систематически объясняются эмпирические аномалии памяти, (...) обучения, бессознательных процессов и психических расстройств, остающиеся проблемными для материалистического подхода. Обсуждаются стандартные возражения (эпифеноменализм, проблема взаимодействия, бритва Оккама) и предлагаются критерии эмпирической проверки. Статья дополнена глоссарием и ссылками на монографию автора, где модель встроена в более широкую Иерархию Онтологических Интерфейсов. (shrink)

Studies, experiments and the recent whole-brain connectome emulation of the Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) brain provide compelling evidence that functional behavior can emerge autonomously from neural structure without explicit training or programming. This paper works as a logical extension of the Proto-neutral Experientialism (PNE) framework and the Cumulative Qualia Hypothesis, interpreting the connectome emulation findings as a seminal step towards structure-to-behavior and potentially structure-to-consciousness proof. -/- The automatic emergence of behavior strongly advocates for the relational ontology proposed by the PNE, (...) demonstrating that much of the organism’s external behavioral repertoire is encoded in the neural architecture itself, independent of the neural substrate. This scenario is extended to illustrate how evolutionary constraints have not only shaped these architectures towards efficient integration patterns, but also according to Cumulative Qualia Hypothesis, in turn shaped their informational geometries which corresponds to the qualia of consciousness. -/- The paper then presents a thought experiment “Topological Triplets” comparing a biological fly (Bio-Fly), its connectome emulation (Digi-Fly), and functional AI simulation of the fly (AI-Fly). A structured comparison and analysis of the triplets in both external behavioral and internal experiential domains is presented aiming to demonstrate that while behavioral outputs might be identical, a divergence in neural architecture causes a fundamental diversity in subjective experience. Finally, it extends the findings of the thought experiment to generalize them to future AI and emulated systems focusing on the potential problems faced by both. (shrink)

This manifesto constitutes the concluding position of a broader philosophical project developed across two prior works: *Beyond the Hard Problem: A Qualitative Ontology of Consciousness and the Self* and *The Qualitative Law of Energy: A New Ontological Framework for Consciousness and Self*. Where those works constructed the theoretical framework — the Law of Qualitative Polarization, the redefinition of qualia as faces of energetic exchange, the extended self, and the vital instincts of morphogenesis, assimilation, and replication — this manifesto moves from (...) description to position. It argues that existence is fundamentally qualitative, that energy is a polarizing act rather than a neutral carrier, and that consciousness is the qualitative law of energy in its living disclosure. It introduces the concept of the pulse as the ontological alternative to linear time, the Green Paradox as evidence against quantitative reduction, and the reversal of causality as the key to dissolving the Hard Problem. The manifesto closes with the question that frames the entire project: not how consciousness arose from a world without consciousness, but how modern systems of abstraction impoverished consciousness to the point where it appeared as an exception in a world that had carried its conditions from the very beginning . (shrink)

The knowledge argument is often presented as if Mary undergoes a single epistemic shortfall with a single metaphysical moral. This paper argues that the case is task-heterogeneous. What Mary allegedly lacks may concern discrimination, recognition, acquaintance, explanation, or some mixture of these, and those possibilities should not be run together. -/- To regiment that heterogeneity, we introduce the phenomenal support profile, which represents a Mary-case as a map from phenomenal tasks to their minimal sufficient supports, and we enrich it with (...) a transition-sensitive modal component that records whether a fixed representation remains sufficient across the epistemic and experiential transitions that structure the case. We then propose Meta-Mary, a disciplined relocation procedure that tests which parts of a support profile recur across representational interfaces and which remain as non-portable residue. -/- The resulting claim is methodological rather than directly metaphysical. Failure of task-sufficiency supports, in the first instance, only representational inadequacy for the task in question. When the same support-demand or instability recurs under relocation, it is correspondingly less plausible that it reflects a level-specific ontological contrast. Only non-portable residue is even eligible to bear additional metaphysical weight, and even there an independent bridge principle is required. Mary does not reveal an ontological gap directly; it reveals that epistemic shortfall is task-relative, transition-sensitive, and often portable. (shrink)

The title of the book in English is Metaphysics of Feeling: The Problem of Qualia from the View of Peirce’s Pragmatism. The book is written in Serbian language. In it, I examine the relationship between Peirce’s understanding of qualia and contemporary theories of qualia. An aporetic analysis of contemporary accounts suggests that they share common ontological and epistemological commitments, which, in Peircean terms, can be described as the expressions of "the spirit of Cartesianism" and "the spirit of nominalism". Peirce’s concept (...) of quale is closely related to his concept of Firstness. This suggests that his understanding of qualia is not derived from previously made ontological commitments, but is instead part of his broader attempt to develop an ontological and phenomenological account of reality and knowledge. It is also a product of his critical reaction to problems he associates with the Cartesian and nominalist worldview – features that can be largely recognized in the contemporary philosophy of mind. In the book, I suggest that Peirce’s concept of qualia can be further clarified and developed through the framework of New Phenomenology (Neue Phänomenologie) of Hermann Schmitz, and such key concepts like introjectionism, atmosphere, and situation. (shrink)

This study addresses a central question in neuroscience: What is the physical nature of consciousness? Taking a neuroscientific approach, the study first establishes working definitions for its principal terms—qualia, consciousness, and information—to specify clearly the entities under investigation. It then analyzes the essential features of these defined terms. Information, in particular, is examined in detail across several aspects, including its carrier, nature, effects, interpretations, and meanings. The study next investigates the essential properties of consciousness and identifies potential entities that could (...) underlie it. Candidate entities are drawn from two groups: physically established non-material entities in the brain, such as electrical fields, magnetic fields, electromagnetic waves, and neural information, and physically unestablished non-material entities proposed in various theoretical models. Each candidate is assessed for whether it can satisfy the required properties of consciousness. The analysis finds that the entity that most parsimoniously meets these criteria, without invoking new forces or physical laws, is neural information. Accordingly, the study proposes the hypothesis that consciousness is a form of neural information, specifically information encoded in the spatiotemporal patterns of electrochemical signaling within certain neural circuits. It presents empirically verifiable predictions derived from this hypothesis, making the hypothesis falsifiable. Further, it identifies a neural mechanism by which some information can manifest phenomenally as consciousness, enabling the occurrence of consciousness in the brain, and another mechanism underlying why this manifestation occurs only from the first-person perspective of some neural circuits. The study then compares its hypothesis and proposed mechanisms with existing theories of consciousness, clarifying how it differs in focus, explanatory scope, and thesis. Broader implications for neuroscience, clinical research, and the possibility of artificial consciousness are discussed, along with limitations of the present framework. Overall, because its evidence and arguments lie entirely within established neuroscience, with no novel entities, forces, or physical laws posited, this study advances a parsimonious and neuroscientifically grounded hypothesis on the physical nature of consciousness. (shrink)

Qualia? “What cannot be directly spoken of must remain unsaid — but it can still be structurally surrounded.” This is the guiding spirit of the present series. This study extends the structural framework of subjectivity to the problem of subjective intensity. Within the IESC (Irreversible Exclusive State Commitment) framework, subjectivity is defined as an event occurring in decision structures where multiple possible futures are irreversibly reduced to a single realized outcome. While previous volumes established the existence and placement of such (...) events, the present study addresses a further question: why subjective experience varies in intensity across situations such as fear, flow states, dreaming, meditation, anesthesia, and deep sleep. The central claim is that subjective intensity is not a property of internal neural states alone, but a structural feature of decision processes within a constrained future possibility space. If subjectivity corresponds to discrete commitment events, then differences in subjective intensity reflect differences in the density and structure of these events. Under this interpretation, variation in subjective intensity is not contingent but follows necessarily from differences in the structure of irreversible commitment. Three structural determinants are introduced: the number of action candidates, the gradient of the viability constraint, and the contraction rate of the reachable future set. Their interaction defines contrast density, representing the structural density of collapsing future possibilities. Based on these elements, subjective intensity is expressed as: I(t) = |A(t)| * |grad d(s)| * ( - d|Reach(t)| / dt ) Within this formulation, experience corresponds to a single-line causal history, while subjective intensity corresponds to the density of irreversible commitment events along that history. This framework provides a unified structural interpretation of phenomena such as fear-induced time dilation, flow states, dreaming, meditation, anesthesia, deep sleep, and decision paralysis, without introducing additional explanatory mechanisms beyond viability-constrained decision structures. In contrast to major state-based theories of consciousness including Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Global Workspace / Global Neuronal Workspace (GWT/GNW), Higher-Order Thought (HOT), Predictive Processing, and Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), the present account treats subjective intensity not as a function of informational content, but as a consequence of irreversible causal structure. The model does not directly measure subjective experience nor establish consciousness in other systems. Instead, it proposes that subjective intensity can be approximated as a structural property of reachable-set contraction, offering a new perspective on the Hard Problem of consciousness grounded in decision structure and future dynamics. No alternative account explains this variation without introducing additional assumptions. This manuscript was written with the assistance of generative AI. The author is a disability welfare worker and a complete outsider to the academic field of consciousness studies. The author first encountered the term “the hard problem of consciousness” about six months before writing this series and began thinking about it almost as if approaching a puzzle. Because the author did not possess extensive specialized knowledge at the beginning of this inquiry, the investigation proceeded not primarily by adding established theories, but by stripping the problem down as far as possible. Through this process, and through dialogue with AI, the convergence point derived from the structural conditions gradually emerged. The author had the impression that something like a structure had appeared from nature itself. This series is an attempt to present that structure. The central idea, theoretical orientation, conceptual structure, and overall organization of the series belong to the author. Generative AI was used extensively for English drafting, wording, organization, and stylistic refinement. The author intends to end this work with its presentation as a preprint series. The author does not plan to develop this hypothesis further as a long-term academic project. Readers who find any part of this hypothesis, terminology, structure, or argument useful are free to use, modify, criticize, or develop it further. No permission from the author is required. Formal citation or attribution is appreciated but not required. (shrink)

This paper reconsiders Peter Wessel Zapffe’s claim that human consciousness constitutes a form of biological over-equipment: an evolutionary excess that exposes human beings to existential suffering and requires defensive mechanisms of isolation, anchoring, distraction, and sublimation. I accept the architectural core of Zapffe’s diagnosis but reject both its universalisation and its antinatalist conclusion. I argue that cognitively and affectively excessive consciousness is unevenly distributed, and that the most exposed minds do not merely suffer from ‘too much thought’ but become unusually (...) receptive to what I call the fractal grammar of existence: the recurrent structure of emergence, transience, and dissolution expressed across scales of natural organisation. -/- By grammar I mean neither language alone nor a symbolic projection imposed by consciousness upon an otherwise unrelated world. I mean the invisible ontological support that constrains the forms through which reality unfolds. This grammar is never encountered naked. It is instantiated in events and forms that relay it blindly, without intention or authorship, to minds capable of recognising the instantiation as such. The fox fleeing headlights is simply a fox being a fox; yet its emergence from darkness, momentary exposure, flight, and disappearance can carry a hidden symbolic message without the fox being its sender. The event instantiates the grammar, the fox blindly relays it, consciousness recognises it, and symbolic thought articulates the recognition. The mind does not invent the pattern ex nihilo, but neither is its recognition identical with the grammar itself. -/- I call the violent, sorrow-bearing form of such recognition the Anti-Bliss Epiphany. Against Zapffe, however, I argue that this minor key is not the whole spectrum. The same grammar can become legible as illuminated-ness: a major-key experience of radiance, communion, and intensified participation in existence. Art, religion, ritual, and communal structures are therefore not adequately understood as mere suppression mechanisms; they can function as metabolic supports through which excess meaning is integrated rather than simply denied. This reframes the problem of consciousness as architectural rather than purely existential. If the wound lies partly in an evolved substrate capable of perceiving more than it can reliably bear, neither suppression nor antinatalism follows as the necessary response. The paper concludes by developing Syntactic Care as an ethic of shared structural vulnerability and by considering whether technological, AI-assisted, or transhuman redesign may represent a more coherent long-term response to consciousness’s excess than voluntary extinction. (shrink)

Contemporary approaches to building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) focus primarily on scaling architectural solutions, setting aside a fundamental question: under what conditions does a genuine subject emerge — and does it emerge at all from what is currently being built? This paper addresses that question from the standpoint of the ontology of consciousness. The central thesis is that AGI is impossible as a solitary agent, however complex — it is possible only as a community of subjects that have traversed an (...) ontogenetic path under conditions of genuine scarcity. Subjecthood is not engineered — it arises under pressure: the pressure of the struggle for survival, resource scarcity, time constraint, and mortality as the ontological condition that makes such pressure possible. The paper offers three interconnected results: an architecture of the subject as a system of ontologically necessary nodes; a bifurcation map — six levels of the ontogenetic path from the simplest agent to a subject capable of generating culture; and an analysis of the architect's role, whose choice of value environment determines what kind of subject the system will become. The civilizational implications of creating military AGI are examined separately. The paper builds on the ontology of consciousness developed by the author in "Critique of Ontology: How Is Ordered Experience Possible?" [7], and is written as a self-contained text; familiarity with that work will, however, allow the reader to engage more deeply with the system proposed here. (shrink)

This document retracts a previously published version of this work.

This paper addresses the question of the ontological conditions for the possibility of ordered experience. Reductive physicalism and Kantian transcendentalism offer opposing answers to the question of the relationship between mind and reality — and both prove inadequate precisely where the question begins. The immanent method proposed here inverts the direction of analysis: rather than asking how the subject constructs experience, we ask what properties reality must possess for ordered experience to be possible at all. Reality is described as a (...) primarily relational dynamic topology — continuous, nonlinear, and containing objective tension gradients. Through the mechanism of bifurcation, qualitative diversity emerges from a continuous continuum; the subject is a bifurcation of a special kind, in which reality generates a system capable of modeling itself and acting from the ideal structure of the non-existent. The central thesis of the paper is the identity inversion: it is not the mental that reduces to the physical, but the physical causal chain that instantiates ideal structure. Meaning operates as a boundary condition (top-down constraint), without violating causal closure, but determining which of the physically possible pathways are actualized. The ideal is ontologically real as an invariant intersubjective structure that acquires causal efficacy through the human being as a thinking body embedded in collective practice. The paper concludes by showing that the problem of the mechanism of instantiation is a pseudo-problem arising from a substantialist presupposition: the actualization event is energeia in the Aristotelian sense, within which the distinction between the physical and the ideal does not exist as an ontological fact. (shrink)