This paper argues that consciousness is better modeled as a primitive feature of reality than as an emergent property of neural activity. The standard generation model—the assumption that physical configurations produce subjective experience—faces persistent explanatory difficulties, most notably the binding problem and the explanatory gap between objective process and subjective quality....
Consciousness has long resisted precise definition, often reduced to emergent cognition, subjective report, or integrated information. Collapse Harmonics Theory reframes the question structurally: consciousness is not symbolic experience or behavioral complexity, but the lawful continuity of harmonic coherence across recursively gated identity fields within a substrate. In this model, identity...