What can a whole add while its constituent processes continue, and what evidence identifies that addition? We distinguish process persistence, complete structural preservation, and equality of a local observation. A finite overlap contract separates shared physical occurrences, admissibility of a joint description, and relations left undetermined by local descriptions. Exact overlap requires...
Theories of consciousness that associate subjects with physical systems face an individuation problem in addition to the problem of assigning phenomenal structure: when several physical systems are plausible subject candidates, which one is the subject, and how is that subject tracked through physical change? We formulate this as a combined selection-and-tracking problem over physical state...
Contemporary theories of consciousness increasingly appeal to intrinsic causal organization, counterfactual structure, or relational phenomenal structure. Yet a prior question remains insufficiently separated from these proposals: **which realized physical processes are eligible to contribute to the organization of a present experience at a particular episode?** We introduce a token-level...
Comparing human, non-human animal, and artificial experience requires distinguishing whether a target has phenomenal experience from which aspects of its experience would be comparable if it does. Multidimensional profiles, behavioral similarities, and mechanistic correspondences provide important evidence, but do not by themselves settle measurement semantics, information loss, or the scope of...