Operationalizing Organized Physical Interiority: A Proxy, Perturbation, Recovery, and Cross-Substrate Framework

Summary

Claims about organized interiority and consciousness often rely on broad resemblance to features like integration or adaptive behavior, but such features alone do not justify stronger inferences. This paper presents an operational framework for evaluating Organized Physical Interiority (OPI) using six revisable criteria: load-bearing integration, boundedness, temporal stability, governed regime maintenance, asymmetric interior organization, and perturbation recovery. It introduces a proxy ladder distinguishing weak, moderate, and strong evidence, and separates substrate, state-transition, organization, and consciousness relevance. The framework aims to strengthen, downgrade, or reject claims through increasingly discriminating empirical tests, not to detect consciousness.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Preprint — not peer reviewed Abstract Claims about organized interiority, consciousness-relevant organization, and cross-substrate equivalence are often advanced through broad resemblance to markers such as integration, recurrence, synchrony, adaptive behavior, or substrate-specific dynamics. Such features may be scientifically informative, but their presence alone does not establish an organizational role or justify stronger inferences about consciousness. This paper develops an operational framework for evaluating candidate forms of Organized Physical Interiority (OPI) without reducing them to a single metric, threshold, network, or substrate signature. The framework specifies six revisable organizational criteria: load-bearing integration, boundedness, temporal stability, governed regime maintenance, asymmetric interior organization, and perturbation recovery. It introduces a proxy ladder distinguishing weak, moderate, and strong evidence; separates substrate, state-transition, organization, and consciousness relevance; and requires criterion-specific links among proposed proxies, matched controls, perturbation logic, recovery outcomes, and justified spatial and temporal grain. Particular emphasis is placed on distinguishing reciprocal constraint from covariance, inherited organizational continuity from ordinary memory or fixed path dependence, and same-regime recovery from functionally equivalent reorganization, degraded viability, or externally restored output. The framework also provides a disciplined basis for biological–artificial comparison. Successful artificial reproduction may support local organizational portability or tested sufficiency under credibly matched conditions, but does not by itself establish artificial consciousness, universal classical sufficiency, or phenomenal equivalence. Conversely, a biological residual is informative only after credible functional and causal matching, including controls for implementation gaps. The proposed framework is therefore intended not as a consciousness detector, but as a reversible research program for strengthening, downgrading, or rejecting candidate organizational-interiority claims through increasingly discriminating empirical tests. Overview This preprint develops an operational framework for investigating candidate forms of Organized Physical Interiority (OPI) without treating any single metric, network property, substrate feature, or successful artificial analogue as a consciousness verdict. The framework specifies six revisable organizational criteria: load-bearing integration, boundedness, temporal stability, governed regime maintenance, asymmetric interior organization, and perturbation recovery. It introduces a proxy ladder distinguishing weak, moderate, and strong evidence; separates substrate, state-transition, organization, and consciousness relevance; and requires proposed proxies to be linked to criterion-specific controls, perturbations, recovery outcomes, and justified spatial and temporal grain. Particular emphasis is placed on avoiding common inferential errors: mistaking covariance for reciprocal constraint, ordinary memory or fixed path dependence for inherited organizational continuity, restored output for recovery of an organized regime, and matched task performance or shared metrics for cross-substrate equivalence. The paper also provides operational reference tables, matched-control guidance, intervention-validity checks, a criterion-discrimination matrix, and a staged protocol for biological–artificial comparison. The aim is methodological rather than classificatory. The framework does not define phenomenal consciousness or provide a detector for it. It offers a reversible research program through which candidate organizational-interiority claims can be strengthened, downgraded, treated as non-discriminating, or rejected as evidence becomes more causally discriminating. 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