From Universality to Consciousness: Beyond the Skull, Into the World

Abstract

AbstractThe laws of the world are common, but the world does not appear in the same manner to everybearer. This paper explains that difference without treating it as an exception to universal law. Its proposal is that a history of relations with the world folds back into the present as a condition of further formation. History is not exhausted by a collection of past contents. It is a presently operative organization that changes what can be received, distinguished, retained, and made possible next.The same input can therefore be actualized differently through differently formed organizations, and the consequence of each actualization becomes a condition of what follows.I identify qualia with the manner in which the world appears along such a formed path. A quale is neither the latent historical structure by itself nor a scalar magnitude of change. It is the event in which a difference in the world is actualized with the quality, temporality, significance, and privacy specific to this history. This constitutive identification is the philosophical center of the account. Its mechanistic conditions are decomposed into present receptivity, historical formation, present application, value-direction and action attribution, and consequences returned from an independent world.The preserved computational studies separate structural differentiation from historical efficacy,storage from access, informational return from attribution to one’s own action, and persistence from correctability. A nonlinear AI MIX increases some history-dependent effects and improves initial incorporation of novel directions, but it does not establish a general advantage in long-term retention. Passive Allen analyses preserve relative historical differences while failing the preregistered principal signature of prospective formation. History-community constructions offer candidates for describing quality, intensity, breadth, and connectivity, whereas the formation of a third relation-community and the structure of particular emotions remain unconfirmed hypotheses.Psychophysics, memory research, representational geometry, and connectomics constrain different parts of the proposal. They must not be pooled as though they were one experiment. This paper does not claim to derive phenomenal consciousness from computational scores. It gives a continuous explanatory path from universality through individuation and latent geometry to the actualization of a world for a bearer; it states why that actualization should be identified with experience, and it retains the burden carried by that identification.