From Operational Indexing to Experiential Localization: A Comparative Organizational Framework for Probabilistic Inference about Animal Consciousness

Abstract

This paper develops Experiential Localization (EL) as a comparative organizational framework for probabilistic inference concerning animal consciousness. The central problem is that experiential accessibility cannot be directly observed across species, while behavioural and biological evidence can nevertheless alter confidence among competing interpretations. The framework distinguishes operational indexing, in which biological processes separately relate activity to organismal condition, environmental circumstances, temporal context, and adaptive significance, from Common Reference Organization, in which organismal, spatial, temporal, salience-related, and action-relevant processes become persistent and mutually constraining around the continuing circumstances of the same organism. Biological organization exhibiting this convergence is described as candidate EL architecture. A separate construct, Experiential Localization Requirement (ELR), characterizes the ecological and adaptive demands that may favour integrated organism-centred control. ELR, candidate EL architecture, and Experiential Localization are explicitly distinguished: adaptive demand does not establish integrative architecture, and integrative architecture does not establish consciousness. The framework emphasizes convergence rather than the accumulation of cognitive capacities, and develops empirical criteria involving persistence, cross-domain integration, flexible transfer, contextual recruitability, reference-preserving displacement, perturbational dependence, and resistance to decomposition into independent local processes. Comparative stress tests across substantially different forms of biological organization illustrate why candidate EL architecture should be assessed organizationally rather than through brain size, neuron number, anatomical similarity, or phylogenetic rank. Experiential Localization is proposed as neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness. Its contribution is instead to provide an intermediate explanatory level between adaptive biological organization and cautious phenomenological inference, making the structure of comparative uncertainty more explicit, experimentally testable, and empirically tractable.