Persistence-based accounts of identity-bearing systems — HAOS-type frameworks, the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, and related approaches — rely on batteries of dynamical observables to characterize which substrates constitute persisting systems. We show that such batteries are insufficient, on at least one substrate where frameworks would naturally apply them, to individuate...
The philosophical zombie thought experiment — the conception of a being physically and functionally identical to a conscious human but lacking phenomenal experience — has shaped consciousness discourse for three decades. Arguments against zombie-possibilism have proceeded through two main routes: logical analysis identifying self-referential or symmetry problems in the thought experiment, and...
Current accounts of affect in the philosophy of mind, affective neuroscience, and consciousness studies fall into three broad classes — phenomenological, functional, and eliminativist — each presupposing a shared prior assumption that none specifies: that the systems under analysis are bounded, persisting units whose affective states can be coherently analyzed. Adjacent traditions...
Major theoretical programs in consciousness studies disagree about what consciousness is while tacitly agreeing on whose consciousness is at issue. The system whose integration is measured, whose workspace is mapped, whose free energy is minimized is presupposed by each framework, not derived within it. This agreement is not benign: it fixes the referent of every downstream claim, constrains...
Frameworks across consciousness studies, cognitive science, systems theory, and engineering share a structural dependency: each requires a bounded, persistence-capable unit at a specific point in its formalism and supplies none. This paper identifies that dependency as a category error common to all post-system frameworks — frameworks that operate on systems without deriving the conditions...
This paper develops a constraint-geometric framework for analyzing the persistence, revision, and collapse of scientific theories. Drawing on the concept of organizational closure from the biological autonomy tradition (Maturana & Varela, Moreno & Mossio, Barandiaran), I argue that theories are not merely descriptions of identity-under-constraint but are themselves closure structures whose...
The explanatory gap is not evidence of a missing force, but of a missing condition. Every major consciousness framework — Integrated Information Theory, the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, and Predictive Processing — presupposes a bounded, persistence-capable unit at a specific point in its formalism and supplies none. The system whose consciousness is to...
Current empirical approaches to consciousness rely on measures of integration, responsiveness, and reportability, all of which track relatively late-stage phenomena. This paper introduces a minimal operational criterion for detecting an earlier event: the first sustained instance of recursive closure in neural dynamics. We argue that recursion functions as a constraint-satisfying mechanism...