Active Self-Presence: Consciousness as a Temporally Extended Self-World Process — A Constitutive Unification Hypothesis

Abstract

Contemporary theories of consciousness privilege recurrent processing, global availability, integrated causal structure, higher-order representation, predictive world modeling, viability-weighted control, and other mechanisms. Active Self-Presence (ASP) asks whether at least some of these mechanisms are better understood not as rival phenomenal causes at the same explanatory level, but as causal projections of a single temporally extended organization. ASP proposes the constitutive identity hypothesis that phenomenal consciousness is identical to a temporally organized, recursively self-transforming self-world process. The proposed process is characterized by four structural relations: temporal self-transformation, self-world relation, differential continuation, and causal unity. Their conjunction is offered as a candidate constitutive level of description whose scientific value depends on whether it supplies explanatory compression and discriminating interventions beyond the mechanisms considered separately. Temporal self-transformation concerns cumulative causal inheritance rather than authentic historical ancestry. A causally complete present organization could, in principle, be instantiated directly; once instantiated, however, the process's own transformations must participate in generating the conditions of later phases. Process membership is likewise defined organizationally rather than anatomically. A component is constitutively incorporated only insofar as its evolving state-dependent dynamics participate counterfactually and recurrently in generating the subsequent transition organization of the same causally unified trajectory. This criterion motivates internal perturbation, feedback interruption, playback substitution, causal partition, and generic-enabling substitution tests, and permits extracranial mechanisms to become temporarily constitutive when they enter the same recurrent causal machinery. The identity claim also distinguishes ontological identity from epistemic access: the same process is externally investigable as causal organization and, under the hypothesis, intrinsically present as phenomenal occurrence. Qualitative differences within that process are treated provisionally as relationally organized modes rather than isolated phenomenal atoms. This supplies a preliminary account of content structure while leaving open whether relational organization exhaustively determines qualitative character. The resulting architecture can be compared directly with IIT, GNWT, RPT, HOT/AST, active inference, IWMT, PCIT, Neural Darwinism/Dynamic Core approaches, and enactivism. Intervention, recurrence, externalism, closed- loop coupling, causal partitioning, embodied regulation, and dynamic integration all have substantial precedent within these literatures. The distinctive question is therefore whether the four-relation topology identifies a useful phenomenal unit and generates empirical constraints that are not already supplied by those frameworks. If it does not, ASP is best understood as a unifying redescription rather than an independent general theory of consciousness.