The Structural Conditions of Subjecthood - A structural approach to minimal consciousness and subjecthood

Debates about consciousness, artificial intelligence, animal minds, and moral status often conflate distinct questions requiring different standards of explanation. This article distinguishes four such questions: subjectivity, moral patiency, personhood, and autonomous will. Current work has progressed on functional and phenomenological description, but a third task remains underdeveloped: a structural specification of the organisational conditions under which there is anything it is like to be a system. The article proposes a structural turn, asking what a system must be like for subjectivity to arise. Three provisional candidate conditions are introduced: dynamically maintained boundary, integrated field of co-present states, and self-referential global registration. Implications for artificial systems, animal consciousness, metaphysical neutrality, normativity, and borderline cases are considered.

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Abstract

Debates about consciousness, artificial intelligence, animal minds, and moral status often conflate distinct questions that require different standards of explanation and assessment. This article distinguishes four such questions: subjectivity, moral patiency, personhood, and autonomous will. It argues that current work has made progress on two tasks—functional and phenomenological description—yet a third remains underdeveloped: a structural specification of the organisational conditions under which there is anything it is like to be a system at all. The article, therefore, proposes a structural turn. Rather than asking only what consciousness does or what experience feels like, it asks what a system must be like, in organisational terms, for subjectivity to arise. Three provisional candidate conditions are introduced—dynamically maintained boundary, integrated field of co-present states, and self-referential global registration—not as a finished theory, but as a sketch of the constraints. The paper then considers implications for artificial systems, animal consciousness, metaphysical neutrality, normativity, and borderline cases.