NEUROSCIENCE THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS (NTC): A Structural and Constitutional Solution to the Hard Problem of Consciousness (CIA)

Abstract

The Neuroscience Theory of Consciousness (NTC) presents a biologically grounded, structurally rigorous, and constitutionally complete account of conscious experience that resolves the Hard Problem of Consciousness without invoking non-physical primitives or metaphysical dualism. The central argument is that the Hard Problem, as standardly formulated, is not a gap in nature but a conceptual artifact — a product of treating phenomenal experience as an additional entity over and above neural activity, rather than as the internal aspect of that activity from within a biological self-modeling system. NTC proposes that consciousness is a biological macro-property that emerges from complex, recurrently processed, and globally broadcast neural activity, and that its distinctive function is data-to-experience transduction: the constitutive mapping of high-dimensional neural dynamics into the phenomenal domain. This framework resolves the Hard Problem by demonstrating that consciousness is not an additional physical force, but the reflexive process of mapping high-dimensional neural geometries into phenomenal experience. By defining phenomenal character as the inherent internal aspect of neural activation, the explanatory gap is bridged — rendering the "hard" problem a fundamental feature of the nervous system's internal self-modeling. The paper advances six core structural theses, provides formal state-space notation, and proposes empirically testable predictions. The theoretical lineage of NTC originates in the author's CIA (Consciousness, Intelligence, Awareness) Framework, first developed in September 2011, of which NTC is the empirically grounded scientific extension.