Neural Dynamics, Structural Eligibility, Availability, and Content: A Factorized Framework for Conscious Realization

Abstract

Consciousness research often moves from neural measurements to claims about conscious states without clearly separating the biological system, the observation procedure, empirical state-space structure, operational coordination, and theoretical realization conditions. This paper develops a factorized framework that distinguishes these levels and asks which distinctions are empirically necessary. Neural measurements are treated as context-dependent projections of an evolving biological substrate. Empirical occupancy is separated from prospectively defined operational support and from a hypothesized structural-eligibility condition. Structural eligibility is further distinguished from organism-level availability, content organization, and recent trajectory history. Their joint contribution to realization is represented by a general model class, while a multiplicative combination is retained only as a falsifiable empirical baseline. The framework generates prospective tests based on multidescriptor prediction, factor dissociation, selective perturbation, content beyond decodability, trajectory and recovery structure, support-level non-collapse, and relational generalization across observation contexts. Each prediction is paired with an explicit failure or reduction condition. Theoretical structural eligibility is treated as an unestablished hypothesis that earns an independent role only through convergent held-out, perturbational, and cross-context evidence; otherwise it should be removed. The proposal is therefore not a new scalar measure of consciousness or a solution to the hard problem, but a disciplined architecture for separating measurement, operational evidence, theoretical claims, and their falsification in consciousness science.