Actual Participation Before Counterfactual Capacity: A Token-Level Constraint on Conscious Organization

Abstract

Contemporary theories of consciousness increasingly appeal to intrinsic causal organization, counterfactual structure, or relational phenomenal structure. Yet a prior question remains insufficiently separated from these proposals: **which realized physical processes are eligible to contribute to the organization of a present experience at a particular episode?** We introduce a token-level constraint that distinguishes intrinsic or mechanistic membership from episode-specific actual causal participation. A realized physical episode is represented by an **actual-participation hypergraph**, whose hyperedges encode token-level joint contributions among realized physical events or states. Counterfactual response profiles are then admitted only for processes belonging to this realized support. The resulting view, which we call **participation-restricted dispositionality (PRD)**, occupies a position between trajectory-only actualism and unrestricted dispositionalism: present phenomenal content is constrained by actual participation, while the relational role of an actual participant may depend on its locally realized dispositions. The proposal preserves the possible relevance of silent inhibitory states, subthreshold variables, static enabling conditions, and other non-spiking physical constraints when they participate in the realized episode, while denying that a purely standby capacity must affect present phenomenology merely because it belongs to a larger intrinsic system. We formulate idle-support invariance, show why state-level or trajectory-level equivalence can erase token actual-causal differences, and develop a participation-sensitive requirement for multiscale causal abstraction. We then prove two formal limits: structural invariances do not uniquely determine an absolute psychophysical bridge, and any bridge invariant under a declared class of phenomenal-null transformations must factor through the corresponding physical quotient. Finally, we derive an empirical contrast with dispositional interpretations of silent-neuron manipulations. A secondary section records a symmetry limit on unique subject selection, but subject individuation is not a primary novelty claim of the paper. The framework does not derive phenomenality from non-phenomenal premises, nor does it claim to solve the hard problem. Its narrower aim is to constrain **which physical facts a lawful theory of present phenomenal organization is allowed to read**. **Keywords:** consciousness; actual causation; dispositionalism; integrated information theory; intrinsic computational functionalism; causal structure; multiscale causation; silent neurons; counterfactuals TA-TR-2026-18, version 1.0. Human author of record and responsible depositor: Hongju Liu. Substantial ChatGPT assistance under human direction. Not peer reviewed; no institutional endorsement is claimed. Adjacent first-party non-amending scholarship. The paper does not claim that actual causation, intrinsic causal organization, the actualism/dispositionalism distinction, or exclusion of idle Olympia machinery are new. Its narrower proposed contribution is an episode-specific token actual-participation gate on which local dispositions may enter present phenomenal organization.