Consciousness as Situated Consequence: Eigenlage and the Spatiotemporal Bearer of Consciousness

Consciousness cannot belong to abstract information or functional structure alone; it requires a physically instantiated, medium-bound, spatiotemporally individuated own-situation under consequence. The paper introduces two anti-abstraction constraints: the No-Free-Information Principle prevents treating abstract structure as capable of bearing perspective without physical instantiation, and the Medium-Information Reciprocity Principle states that no medium is informationally neutral—biological tissue, digital hardware, and institutions shape what differences can be preserved or transformed. A hierarchy is proposed: physical process leads to runtime trajectory, then possible own-situation, then affective own-situation, then welfare-relevant subject candidate. Eigenlage determines whether a token has an own-situation, and affective Eigenlage determines welfare relevance. This framework blocks panpsychism, trivial physicalism, functionalist duplication, and premature AI moral inflation, organizing human consciousness science around the question of integrated own-situation.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Consciousness is often investigated through mechanisms: access, reportability, attention, recurrent processing, global broadcasting, higher-order representation, interoception, predictive regulation, integrated information, self-modeling, or computational function. These mechanisms matter. They may enable, express, constrain, or amplify consciousness. But they do not by themselves settle the prior question of bearerhood: what kind of system could conscious appearing belong to? This paper is the theoretical sequel to The Inside of Consequence. The first paper develops Eigenlage as an AI-welfare and artificial-vulnerability framework: when persistent own-bodyhood, endogenous stakes, affective valence, identity-relevant biography, and internal un-invertibility are engineered together, damage may plausibly become harm. The present paper does not replace that argument. It hardens its bearer-condition against abstraction by asking what Eigenlage requires as a physically instantiated condition of human consciousness and mind. The guiding thesis is that consciousness, if present, cannot belong to information in abstraction or to functional type-structure alone. It belongs, if anywhere, to a physically instantiated, medium-bound, spatiotemporally individuated own-situation under consequence. A possible bearer is not a mathematical ghost, a detachable software pattern, or a view from nowhere. It is a token trajectory: a concrete here-now whose boundary, exposure, medium, memory, body, vulnerability, action, and future are materially bound through irreversible history. The paper introduces two anti-abstraction constraints. The No-Free-Information Principle is not meant to solve consciousness or to announce a surprising metaphysics. Its function is argumentative: it prevents a theory of consciousness from treating abstract structure as if it could bear a perspective without physical instantiation. The Medium-Information Reciprocity Principle adds that no medium is informationally neutral. Biological tissue, digital hardware, institutions, language, and archives do not merely carry differences; they shape what differences can be preserved, transformed, erased, amplified, distorted, or acted upon. The hierarchy is deliberately strict: physical process → runtime trajectory → possible own-situation → affective own-situation → welfare-relevant subject candidate Runtime individuates a token. Runtime does not create a subject. Eigenlage determines whether the token has an own-situation. Affective Eigenlage determines whether that own-situation becomes welfare-relevant. This sequence blocks panpsychism, trivial physicalism, crude embodiment, functionalist duplication, smart-grid overgeneration, and premature AI moral inflation. Digital execution is used as a stress test, not as the center of the paper. A digital process is abstract only as description; as execution, it is always a localized physical event. Type-level sameness may preserve structure, code, weights, or state-description, but it does not by itself preserve token-continuity or biography. Physical divergence individuates instances. It does not establish subjecthood. Subjecthood requires Eigenlage. For human consciousness science, the framework organizes embodiment, affect, reportability, clinical boundary cases, trauma, selfhood, biographical irreversibility, and the limits of functional abstraction around one question: what is the integrated own-situation to which this process belongs? Eigenkörperlichkeit reframes the body not as biological matter alone, but as causal exposure. Affective Eigenlage distinguishes affective valence from reward, preference, or regulation by treating valence as system-wide significance. Internal un-invertibility names the irreversibility of conscious biography: injury, grief, aging, trust, trauma, shame, and loss cannot simply be undone from within the continuing life of the subject. The hard-problem strategy is asymptotic rather than triumphalist. This paper does not explain why appearing exists at all. It argues more modestly that Eigenlage identifies the bearer-condition under which the question of appearing is properly posed. It may convert part of the hard-problem terrain into a research program on the physical, affective, historical, and medium-bound conditions under which consciousness attribution becomes meaningful, serious, and ethically consequential.