Closure Before Consciousness: A Constructive Account of the Explanatory Gap

Abstract

The explanatory gap is not evidence of a missing force, but of a missing condition. Every major consciousness framework — Integrated Information Theory, the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, and Predictive Processing — presupposes a bounded, persistence-capable unit at a specific point in its formalism and supplies none. The system whose consciousness is to be explained is assumed, not derived. This paper identifies the missing condition as closure under maintenance: the condition under which a configuration's boundary conditions would not persist without its own internal dynamics. Closure is formalized as a binary predicate, situated within a dependency chain (constraint landscape → seed-field → metastability → closure → identity), and shown to be minimal — thinner than autopoiesis, Rosen-closure, or organizational closure, yet sufficient to generate the explanatory predicates (persistence, boundary, regime behavior, collective failure, hysteresis) that downstream theories require and presuppose. Three reduction cases demonstrate that phenomena treated as independent primitives are consequences of closure-maintained identity: induction–emergence hysteresis in anesthesia follows from the structural non-symmetry of threshold crossing and loop re-closure; decomposition failure in recursively self-conditioned systems follows from closure at sufficient depth and integration; and the persistence of identity through phenomenal dropout follows from identity and consciousness occupying different levels of a dependency hierarchy in which closure is necessary for both but recursion and substrate coupling are additionally necessary for consciousness. The paper draws an explicit boundary: closure is not sufficient for consciousness. Substrate-coupled recursive maintenance — in which the maintenance process operates on its own maintenance structure, instantiated on a substrate whose physical interactions carry the coordination work as a unified dynamical event — is consciousness. The explanatory gap does not close; it relocates, from an unbridgeable chasm between matter and experience to a tractable set of questions about maintenance geometry, recursive regime entry, and substrate-specific binding, anchored in a formalized empirical program with specified falsification conditions.