Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 10, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
Debates on consciousness often move in two directions: the detailed analysis of the brain and the increasing performance of artificial intelligence. Both are indispensable. The brain is necessary for human experience, and AI forces us to reconsider the relation between intelligence, language, self-reference, and consciousness. Yet neither direction, by itself, reaches the structural core of...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 9, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
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...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 7, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
Consciousness research has developed primarily around information integration, global availability, prediction, recurrent processing, higher-order representation, and neural correlates. These approaches have clarified important aspects of conscious experience. Yet they tend to focus on how information appears, is processed, stabilized, or made available. They have paid less attention to the...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
July 3, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
This paper is basically a prompt for making AI take a serious swing at the problem of qualia. In Volumes I–III, I dealt with the question: “Where does subjectivity structurally arise in the first place?” The aim was not to place consciousness or subjectivity at the beginning as something mysterious. Instead, the task was to infer the structural skeleton of subjectivity as strongly as possible...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 27, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
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...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 27, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
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 paper reframes the hard problem of consciousness not as a failure of explanation, but as a structural misclassification, and proposes an event-based framework in which consciousness is understood not as a state, but as a structural...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 27, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
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 paper presents a minimal structural framework for determining the presence and degree of consciousness and subjectivity. Existing theories of consciousness typically characterize subjectivity in terms of internal states, including...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 27, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
Chalmers was right.The hard problem remains hard. However, this does not mean that Structural Knot Theory has failed. The central claim of this paper is that the intentional exclusion of qualia was not a retreat from the problem of consciousness, but a necessary scientific procedure. By separating the structural problem of subjectivity from the phenomenal problem of qualitative appearance,...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 27, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
This paper is an experimental spin-off from The Structural Conditions of Consciousness — Structural Knot Theory. It tests whether AI systems can derive the structural location of subjectivity from only ten reduced structural requirements extracted from the broader series: autonomous action, single body, arrow of time, embodiment-constrained processing, multiple behavioral candidates, contrast...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 26, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
This paper argues that consciousness research becomes methodologically unstable when it attempts to judge consciousness before defining the structural conditions under which subjectivity can become fixed. The central claim of this paper is that the structure of consciousness lies not primarily in integration, but in convergence. Structurally, an integration-centered perspective reaches its...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 25, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
This paper is a direct continuation of the preceding volume, An AI Prompt for Strongly Inferring the Structural Location of Subjectivity. The first volume tested whether ten minimal structural terms, when followed according to their internal logic, recurrently lead to a convergence point: the irreversible reduction of multiple possible trajectories into a single executable history. The present...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 22, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
Current consciousness research has clarified many important mechanisms: information integration, global workspace, predictive processing, the free energy principle, embodiment, higher-order representation, and recurrent processing. Yet one central point remains insufficiently specified: where these mechanisms close into a single subject. Existing theories have often asked how complexity is...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 13, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
This note argues that consciousness research becomes methodologically unstable when it attempts to judge consciousness before defining the structural conditions under which subjectivity can become fixed. From the Turing Test to P300 neural markers, many approaches evaluate behavioral imitation, neural correlation, information integration, or processing bottlenecks without first distinguishing...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 23, 2026
Nagae Mamoru
This paper presents an experimental observation regarding how AI systems structurally derive the “location of subjectivity” when given only nine keywords that are almost implicitly presupposed in biological existence itself. To this end, the paper provides an extremely simple prompt that readers can immediately test on their own smartphones or general AI systems. Despite the minimality of the...