Operationalizing Consciousness: The Grounded Narrative Framework
Deavy Jones Cristobal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 12, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20672379 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Keywords | Operationalization Grounded theory Consciousness Narrative network Process computing Narrative criticism Physicalism Epistemology Cognitive science |
| Key points | Proposes the Grounded Narrative Framework as a physicalist account of consciousness with three empirically tractable diagnostic criteria, arguing that grounding is inherently bottom-up and cannot be engineered from the outside in. |
Abstract
This paper contributes to the literature by proposing the Grounded Narrative Framework, a physicalist account of consciousness that replaces unfalsifiable explanatory-gap arguments with three empirically tractable diagnostic criteria. Unlike existing frameworks — including the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, and Integrated Information Theory — the Grounded Narrative Framework explicitly addresses the developmental conditions under which conscious processing arises, arguing that grounding is inherently bottom-up and cannot be engineered or instantiated from the outside in. In doing so, it offers both a principled critique of current large language model architectures and a substrate-independent diagnostic framework applicable to any candidate system, biological or artificial.