The Inward Closure Hypothesis: Experience as a World Held from Within

Abstract

This working paper proposes the Inward Closure Hypothesis as a coherence-based bridge condition for conscious experience. It argues that consciousness should not be understood as raw information entering awareness, nor merely as information processed by a system, but as information internally held within a self-maintaining field of identity, distinction, binding, self-reference, and repair. The paper develops a structural account of inward holding as the transition from information usable by a system to information present as a world for a subject. It distinguishes local, action-oriented forms of self-in-environment from human symbolic worldhood, connects the proposal to the author’s Self-Verification Argument concerning absolute nothingness, and positions the hypothesis alongside global workspace theory, integrated information theory, predictive/free-energy approaches, autopoiesis, enactivism, and self-model theory. The claim is deliberately bounded: the paper does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness or deduce phenomenal experience from organization alone. Instead, it identifies a proposed bridge condition that any adequate coherence-based account of consciousness must address: how externally describable information becomes self-in-reality held from within.