Operationalizing Consciousness: The Grounded Narrative Framework
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 12, 2026 Deavy Jones Cristobal
A new framework called the Grounded Narrative Framework proposes a physicalist account of consciousness that replaces unfalsifiable explanatory-gap arguments with three empirically testable diagnostic criteria. Unlike existing theories such as the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, and Integrated Information Theory, this framework addresses the developmental conditions under which conscious processing arises, arguing that grounding is inherently bottom-up and cannot be engineered from the outside in. The framework offers a critique of current large language model architectures and provides a substrate-independent diagnostic approach applicable to any candidate system, biological or artificial.