Preface and scope

This monograph asks how awareness is manifested as a bounded perspective and a lived world. Its concern is both formal and human: what distinguishes experience from the processes that support it, how a personal identity is constructed, and what can reasonably be said when perception, memory, or the familiar sense of self changes.

The philosophical interpretation distinguishes the unconditioned ground, the unsplit $\unsplit$ prior to an operational cut, and the working source $S$ and readout $T$. Fundamental awareness provisionally names a quality attributed to the ground; it does not mean thought, recognition or a knowing subject. A physical vessel conditions a localized subject and its lived scene. The ground, the unsplit, the attributed quality, the subject and the scene are not interchangeable. Neither an autobiographical self nor adult human language is required for every possible form of experience.

The formal account is SPC-2: a candidate psychophysical constitution. A certified realization $R^\ast$ supplies physical organization and an explicit selection doctrine. A0 states the ontological commitment; A1–A3 assign perspectives, phenomenal relational structure, and experiential continuation. The finite completion theorem establishes conditional determinacy and covariance. Its mathematics does not prove the ontology or certify a real organism merely because its nervous system is active.

For biological readers, the distinction between explicit conscious access and implicit generative processing helps explain how a scene can be organized without every contributing process appearing as a separate content. Dreaming, anesthesia, sensory isolation, and dissociation make the differences between a continuing vessel, present experience, and later memory especially important. These are interpretive applications, not additional premises of the completion theorem. A truly experience-free interval contains neither a lived scene nor a currently instantiated localized experiential subject. Darkness would itself be a scene. The organism and person can remain physically continuous while a genuine qualification gap ends the experiential episode under A3; renewed qualification begins a new episode.

The physical chapters establish how events, records, resources, and retained causal use can be modeled without conscious observation producing the event. The two measurement constitutions retain their separate assumptions. The philosophical chapters explain the proposed meaning of the psychophysical laws and their limits. Together they support a candidate internal constitutive resolution of the source-to-manifestation problem, under declared assumptions. Selecting and validating $R^\ast$ for actual vessels, testing phenomenal adequacy, and obtaining independent verification remain distinct obligations.

About this edition.

This revised edition retains the foundational exposition and mathematical constructions of the publication edition of 20 September 2026 while integrating the later programme. A0 now distinguishes the unconditioned ground, the unsplit and the quality provisionally called awareness. This is a substantive philosophical clarification; A1–A3 retain their admission, content and continuation rules. The affirmative AI position is developed in Chapter 22. Enactment, temporal experience, relational appearance, scaffolding and agency are connected to their companion treatments. The worked compatibility cases, ancestry analysis and prospective tests identify the remaining obligations without replacing the stated laws. The verification supplement provides executable checks, recorded results, source provenance and a guide to their scope.