Locating Consciousness as a Puzzle Game From Proof by Absence to the Causal Structure of the Subjective Container

Abstract

This paper explores consciousness as a causal puzzle. Where an investigation of water molecules examines their properties, this inquiry follows the relations that sustain a whirlpool. It shifts attention from identifying consciousness within the brain to tracing the causal organization that could sustain one subject’s present and history. The tools are Occam’s principle and subtraction. Place a body, an environment, and conditions for continued existence on the board, then remove the relations one by one. What ceases to be possible when a relation is removed? This paper calls the method of narrowing down necessary causal roles through such removal “proof by absence.” The key is strong information discard under viability constraints, as developed in the main text. The paper strongly infers that the system realizing the resulting causal linkage constitutes the subjective container. Narrowing down causal roles and identifying their realization with the subject are separate steps. The latter is an inference based on correspondence with the subject’s single present, bearing of consequences, continuing history, and internal reference, together with explanatory economy. It is not a deductive proof of experience or of the structure’s uniqueness. Beginning with human language, self-awareness, or deliberation risks confusing higher-order abilities with the structure that makes a subject possible. The framework therefore examines candidate competition, closure, consequences, and continuation across biological and artificial systems. It hypothesizes that brains substantially amplify this causal loop and predicts shared functional organization across species. Comparisons with existing theories ask how their proposed mechanisms connect to the same linkage. Appendix A explores conditions for implementing the subjective container in an artificial system; Appendix B examines its boundaries of realization through sleep, anesthesia, identity-state switching, and related cases. The remaining puzzle concerns qualia: through what mechanism does the inferred subject feel its perceptions? The framework directs this question toward the processes through which perceptual information participates in forming the present of a system that bears consequences and continues. It offers a starting hypothesis for an as-yet-unknown theory of perceptual information becoming an experienced event. This perspective paper grew from a puzzle pursued through dialogue with generative AI by a disability welfare worker outside academic consciousness research, after first learning about the hard problem. It presents causal reasoning without experimental validation. Its contribution is a proposed subject structure, criteria for comparison and testing, and a more concrete question about the emergence of felt experience.