From Intrinsic Aspect to Phenomenal Experience: Consciousness as the Centering of an Inner Domain

Abstract

This paper develops a field-theoretical account of consciousness that aims to overcome the limitations of both reductive physicalism and panpsychism. Its point of departure is the claim that physical reality is not ontologically exhausted by its externally observable aspect. On this basis, a distinction is drawn between an intrinsic, pre-subjective aspect of reality and its phenomenal manifestation in sufficiently organized systems. Consciousness is thus treated neither as a fundamental property of all things nor as a brute emergence from sheer exteriority. The central argument reconstructs a sequence of organizational thresholds within nature. A dynamically open field gives rise to selective stabilization; selective stabilization enables resonance; resonance, in turn, allows for integration; integration, coupled with self-reference, generates an inner domain; and consciousness arises only where such a domain becomes centered through a stable inner–outer asymmetry. This transition is interpreted as a specific form of symmetry breaking: not the emergence of inwardness from nothing, but the reorganization of an already intrinsic inwardness into a centered configuration capable of phenomenal manifestation. In this way, the paper proposes a dynamic reinterpretation of dual-aspect monism. The physical and the phenomenal are understood not as two substances, nor as static co-given attributes, but as two aspects of a single realized organization that becomes phenomenally manifest only at specific thresholds of centering. The result is a middle path that preserves the reality of experience without distributing consciousness across all of nature.