Contemporary theories of consciousness privilege recurrent processing, global availability, integrated causal structure, higher-order representation, predictive world modeling, viability-weighted control, and other mechanisms. Active Self-Presence (ASP) asks whether at least some of these mechanisms are better understood not as rival phenomenal causes at the same explanatory level, but as...
Consciousness research often begins from an assumed separation between physical or computational processing and phenomenal experience, then asks how the former produces the latter. This paper proposes that the assumed separation may be mistaken. At the relevant organizational threshold, an integrated, valenced, self-bound, centered, perspective-bearing process is not merely a cause of...