The Organismic Projection Framework: Consciousness, Mortality, and the Operational Boundaries of Metaphysical Concepts

Abstract

This article develops the Organismic Projection Framework (OPF) as a boundary framework for philosophy of mind, consciousness studies, cognitive science, and debates on artificial consciousness. OPF begins from a conceptual reversal: the human being should not be understood as consciousness inhabiting an organism, but as an organism that, under physiological conditions, sustains a bounded projection regime of world, self-location, valuation, and duration. The framework does not aim to solve the hard problem of consciousness, replace neuroscience, or provide a final metaphysical proof against post-mortem reality. Its aim is more specific: to clarify how human concepts of consciousness, death, eternity, timelessness, indeterminacy, and post-mortem continuity remain dependent on organismically bounded duration, perspective, valuation, memory, and transition. In this sense, OPF functions as a burden-of-intelligibility framework: any claim about personal conscious continuity beyond organismic death must explain how duration, self-location, memory, valuation, and state-transition remain meaningful after the cessation of the organismic projection regime. The paper distinguishes OPF from enactivism, embodied cognition, predictive processing, self-model theory, and homeostatic accounts of consciousness. Rather than replacing these approaches, OPF reorganizes their insights around the neglected question of mortality and the operational boundaries of metaphysical concepts. The framework defines the projection regime through six coupled components: physiological support, world-orientation, temporal continuity, self-location, affective-interoceptive valuation, and relational correction. The article further introduces operational matrices, cross-domain indicators for human subjects, clinical cases, and artificial systems, and possible weakening or falsification conditions. It argues that projection should not be confused with illusion: bounded projections become more objectively reliable when they survive resistance, perturbation, measurement, intersubjective comparison, and instrumental correction. Finally, OPF is applied to artificial consciousness debates, where it rejects both output-based attribution and premature denial. The relevant question is not whether a system declares consciousness, but whether it maintains a bounded regime of world-access, temporal continuity, valuation, self-location, vulnerability, and relational correction under pressure.