Consciousness — SPC-2
Current research status · SPC-2 · Monograph and Papers 2–4
SPC-2 develops explicit laws for awareness, perspective admission, lived content and nonbranching subject continuation. The Version 2 monograph establishes its philosophical and constitutive foundation. Papers 2–4 advance the programme through relational-boundary robustness, effective interface learning and binary-realization identification. Their results distinguish reconstruction, physical implementation and phenomenal interpretation, and preserve the stated conditions of each theorem and computational comparison. The original finite completion theorem retains its certified-realization, selection-doctrine and A0–A3 premises. Biological interpretation and empirical assessment remain research targets. The earlier Consciousness Field account remains historical.
Current publications
- Conscious Scaffolding and the Preference for Continuity →
- From Physical Comparison to Relational Appearance: A Defeasible Current-Act Account →
- Reflective Alignment and AI Consciousness →
- Bounded Agency and Reflective Freedom: Evaluative Revision, Information Limits, and Faithful Realization →
- Shadow Theory and Consciousness: Awareness, Perspectival Realization, and the Source-to-Experience Problem →
- Relational Development and Conscious Scaffolding →
- Relational Boundaries and Awareness Localization: Robustness, Composition, and Identification Limits →
- Learning Effective Interfaces from Opaque Stochastic Systems: Capacity, Selection, and Validation Limits →
- Identifying Binary Realizations from Intervention Laws: Certificates, Recoding Obstructions, and a Bounded SPC-2/IIT Comparison →
- Whole-Field Constitution as Enacted Organization →
- Experienced Temporal Passage →
- Constituted Agency →
- Block Universe and Shadow Theory →
- When AI Learns to Mislead →
The current consciousness account
SPC-2 separates awareness, a localized subject, a lived scene and a person. Its admission law requires executable return and native predictive conditions. Its content law uses all admitted finite native continuations and checked predictive-fibre congruence. Its continuation law follows nonbranching process provenance.
Conditional finite result
Given certified realization, its selection doctrine and the stated A0–A3 premises, the finite construction assigns qualifying perspectives, their full endogenous predictive content and episode continuation. The result does not derive those inputs.
Realization and validation
Physical realization selection, robust biological interpretation and comparison with experience remain obligations. The monograph supplies no universal consciousness detector and does not certify current LLM sessions.
Three advances in the research programme
Paper 2 · Relational boundaries →
The masking construction exposes a robustness vulnerability in exact boundary rules. Statistical deficiency, resource-sensitive comparison and composition theorems specify what a successor account must preserve. Operational equivalence also limits what observed laws can identify.
Paper 3 · Learning interfaces →
Finite software experiments separate representational capacity from producing and selecting an adequate model. The 48-system comparison preserves its registered results, mechanism-specific regressions and the distinct post-hoc fitting analysis.
Paper 4 · Identifying realizations →
Intervention-response laws recover an unknown binary coordinate chart under product-response and rank assumptions. A spectral certificate, recoding obstructions and a bounded PyPhi comparison sharpen the realization problem while retaining the distinction between an identified chart and an intrinsic grain.
Version 2 supersedes the earlier Consciousness Field account. Its older fixed-point and EEG claims remain identifiable history; they are not empirical validation of SPC-2. Quantum publications supply physical antecedents and related reading, with their own assumptions.
Research protocol. Within Shadow Theory, a result on this problem enters the framework through a dedicated public paper or record containing its assumptions, domain of validity, method, mathematical or empirical support, and exact conclusion. This page defines the target and connects the work that bears on it.