Theories of Consciousness: Constraints, Commitments, and Complementarity

The apparent conflict between consciousness science and consciousness-first metaphysics is largely an artifact of ontological packaging rather than of the empirical findings themselves. Contemporary theories of consciousness each package a structural discovery about consciousness inside an ontological commitment the discovery does not entail. When separated, five recurring structural features emerge: integration, global accessibility, self-reference, anticipatory modeling, and non-trivial unity. These features are ontologically portable and describe a common structural territory any complete framework must accommodate. The production inference—the move from the brain correlates with consciousness to the brain produces consciousness—is a metaphysical commitment rather than an empirical finding. The essay argues that the structural findings of consciousness science do not entail physicalism, and the recurring structural features must be accommodated by any complete framework.

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Abstract

Abstract: The apparent conflict between consciousness science and consciousness-first metaphysics is largely an artifact of ontological packaging rather than of the empirical findings themselves. Contemporary theories of consciousness — IIT, Global Workspace, predictive processing, Higher-Order Theories, Recurrent Processing, Attention Schema Theory, Orch OR, and others — each package a structural discovery about consciousness inside an ontological commitment the discovery does not entail. When the two are separated, five recurring structural features emerge across the theory landscape: integration, global accessibility, self-reference, anticipatory modeling, and non-trivial unity. These features — overlapping, their count a clustering choice — describe a common structural territory any complete framework must accommodate, and they are ontologically portable: their predictive content travels across frameworks. Theories fall into three categories — those identifying structural constraints (features any complete framework must accommodate), those denying the explanandum (illusionism and strong deflationary positions), and those relocating the primitive (panpsychism, Russellian monism, cosmopsychism). The diagnostic also makes visible that the production inference — the move from the brain correlates with consciousness to the brain produces consciousness — is a metaphysical commitment rather than an empirical finding, and that the field's live disputes occupy a middle tier of testable constitution claims — which pattern suffices for consciousness — whose resolution, either way, leaves the production question open. This essay's contribution is the theory-level diagnostic: the structural findings of consciousness science do not entail physicalism, the production inference is commitment rather than finding, and the recurring structural features must be accommodated by any complete framework. Keywords: theories of consciousness · constraint-based reasoning · integrated information theory · global workspace theory · predictive processing · illusionism · panpsychism · ontological portability · production assumption · philosophy of mind Part of the Return to Consciousness research program — 30 philosophical essays exploring consciousness-first metaphysics. Full project: https://returntoconsciousness.org/