Six Theories Quietly Agree That Consciousness Is Experience

Six prominent theories of consciousness disagree about the mechanism that produces it, but they all rely on seven shared imports: substrate, mechanism, temporal dynamics, a subject-and-agency side, semantic capacity, phenomenological character, and bounded unity. The subject-and-agency import has a sharper structure: the side that undergoes experience and the side whose admission receives the next content occupy the same architectural slot, called the experiencer-receiver identification. The explicit claims of each theory are partial, but the deployed imports are uniform, and the success-condition imports are uncontestable by the theories themselves. This convergence is evidence about what the field has stipulated as its target.

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Abstract

Six prominent theories of consciousness (HOT, GWT, IIT, RPT, PP, AST) disagree about the mechanism that produces consciousness. They agree on what they import to operate as theories of consciousness at all. The paper reads the six theories in three registers. The explicit register reports what each theory publicly claims. The deployed register reports what each has to put to work for the claims to operate. The success-condition register reports what each has to deliver to count as a theory of consciousness. The reading surfaces seven shared imports no theory can operate without: substrate, mechanism, temporal dynamics, a subject-and-agency side, semantic capacity, phenomenological character, and bounded unity. The subject-and-agency import has a sharper structure than the other six. The side that undergoes experience and the side whose admission receives the next content occupy the same architectural slot in every theory the paper reads. This paper calls the identification the experiencer-receiver identification. It is derived as the choice-scale aspect of the cycle's closure on itself in Stewart (2026ad, Part IV.5). The explicit register is partial. The deployed register is uniform. The success-condition register is uncontestable by the six programs themselves. A theory denying its target has changed subject from consciousness to something else. The convergence at the deployed-import register is a working necessity each theory imported to predict consciousness in any specific system. The convergence is evidence about what the field has stipulated as its target. Keywords: consciousness, theories of consciousness, higher-order theory, global workspace theory, integrated information theory, recurrent processing theory, predictive processing, attention schema theory, illusionism, explanandum