The Inward Closure Hypothesis: Experience as a World Held from Within
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 28, 2026 Kenneth L. Searcy
Consciousness may depend on information being internally held within a self-maintaining field of identity, distinction, binding, self-reference, and repair, rather than merely being processed or entering awareness. The Inward Closure Hypothesis proposes this as a bridge condition for conscious experience, distinguishing information usable by a system from information present as a world for a subject. The account contrasts local, action-oriented self-in-environment with human symbolic worldhood and is positioned alongside global workspace theory, integrated information theory, predictive processing, autopoiesis, enactivism, and self-model theory. The paper does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness but identifies a necessary condition for coherence-based accounts.