Mamoru Nagae

This paper explores consciousness as a causal puzzle. Where an investigation of water molecules examines their properties, this inquiry follows the relations that sustain a whirlpool. It shifts attention from identifying consciousness within the brain to tracing the causal organization that could sustain one subject's present and history. The tools are Occam's principle and subtraction. Place a body, an environment, and conditions for continued existence on the board, then remove the relations one by one. What ceases to be possible when a relation is removed? This paper calls the method of narrowing down necessary causal roles through such removal "proof by absence." The proposed linkage connects viability-related candidate competition, strong information discard, consequences, and continuation. Strong information discard means that incompatible losers irreversibly lose their standing to determine continuation at the same branch, not that their information is completely erased. The winner's consequences become the same system's conditions of continuation and influence subsequent candidate formation. A loser may remain as information without becoming realized history; a winner may disappear as information while its consequences remain effective. An engineering interpretation of death clarifies what viability constraints constrain: the conditions sustaining a specified organization and the boundary at which its continuation is lost. History thereby operates not only as a record, but as present conditions shaping subsequent possibilities. The convergence-point criterion traces the coupling among the unit whose candidates compete, the unit whose conditions change, and the unit that continues from those conditions. The internal reference point denotes the role through which carried consequences influence subsequent formation. Through correspondence with one present, the bearing of consequences, a single history, and internal reference, together with explanatory economy, the paper strongly infers that the system realizing this coupling constitutes the subjective container. Identifying necessary causal roles and identifying their realization with the subject are separate steps. The latter is not a deductive proof of experience or of the structure's uniqueness. The framework begins below human language, self-awareness, and deliberation. It hypothesizes that brains broadly and closely implement this loop and predicts shared functional organization across species. Comparisons with existing theories examine how their mechanisms connect to the same linkage. Appendix A develops artificial-system design conditions; Appendix B examines boundaries of realization through sleep, anesthesia, identity-state switching, and related cases. The remaining puzzle concerns qualia: through what mechanism does the inferred subject feel its perceptions? The framework directs this question toward perceptual processes participating in the formation of the present of a system that bears consequences and continues. It offers a starting hypothesis for an as-yet-unknown theory of perceptual information becoming an experienced event. This perspective paper grew from a puzzle pursued through dialogue with generative AI by a disability welfare worker outside academic consciousness research, after first learning about the hard problem. It presents causal reasoning without experimental validation. Its contribution is a proposed subject structure, criteria for comparison and testing, and a more concrete question about the emergence of felt experience.

This paper proposes the **Self-Foundation Model** by reconsidering the structure of self-worth and psychological fulfillment through a basic question: **Where does a person place the value of the self?** External conditions such as approval from others, intimate relationships, social status, success, achievement, and income can enrich life. However, when they become primary conditions for psychological self-establishment, failure, rejection, comparison, or loss may extend beyond the particular event and develop into global self-negation. The present paper conceptualizes this as a structure in which the primary sources of self-worth are located in external conditions. By contrast, **self-foundation** refers to the capacity and structure through which at least some minimal sources of self-worth and psychological fulfillment are also located within one’s own life. The model calls perceptions, bodily sensations, emotions, thoughts, recognitions, temporal experiences, and other experiences occurring to the person as a subject **world-experience**. Self-foundation is the capacity to receive and savor such experiences as one’s own life, while **foundational fulfillment** refers to the minimal psychological satisfaction that may arise through this process. A central operation of the model is to prevent experience from being immediately routed into global self-evaluation. Thus, “I felt anxiety” is reframed as “I was able to feel anxiety,” and “I lived today” as “I was able to live through today.” Here, **“I was able to...”** is not an evaluation of competence. It functions as a minimally affirmative marker through which the occurrence of experience is not treated as psychologically equivalent to zero. The foundational pathway can therefore be represented as: **world-experience → recognition that one was able to experience → receiving the experience as one’s own life → savoring → foundational fulfillment** Within this structure, success, approval, love, and achievement are not rejected. They are repositioned from necessary conditions for psychological self-establishment to forms of **additive fulfillment** that can further enrich a life that is already psychologically grounded. The model therefore hypothesizes that, when failure is less likely to generalize to the self as a whole, the psychological cost of challenge and renewed attempts may become more localized. As a practical implementation, the paper proposes the **Self-Foundation Journaling Method**. Its aim is not journaling itself, but the formation of a cognitive pathway through which experience is less automatically converted into global self-evaluation and more readily received as part of one’s own life. Appendix A develops a further functional layer by relating the Self-Foundation Model to the separately developed **Deep Functional-Goal Observation Model**. At this deeper level, internal reactions such as anxiety, anger, jealousy, and approval-seeking may be understood not only as experiences to be received as part of one’s own life, but also, provisionally, as outputs of a living mind–body system involved in regulation, protection, maintenance, recovery, or relational preservation. Whereas the Self-Foundation Model concerns **how an experience is connected to self-worth**, this deeper layer asks **why such a reaction may arise at all**. This paper presents a theoretical proposal rather than an empirically validated theory or intervention. Its validity remains open to criticism, empirical testing, falsification, and revision.

The essence of philosophy lies less in providing answers than in determining what is to count as a question. Some philosophical questions do not arise merely from a lack of knowledge. Pain, death, selfhood, freedom, value, and meaning may emerge as philosophical problems only when a conscious subject encounters reality and experiences a tension between lived experience and the way the world is explained. This paper calls that structure conscious friction. From this perspective, the question of whether AI can replace philosophy cannot be reduced to a comparison of intelligence or answer quality. An AI may reason at a high level, integrate vast literatures, generate objections, analyze concepts, and even formulate new questions. Yet it does not follow that those questions arise from the same source as human philosophical questions. At this point, consciousness becomes a variable. A conscious AI and a non-conscious AI may differ in what they select as a problem, which contradictions they treat as significant, which questions they continue to pursue, and how they reconstruct question-space itself. This may mark a distinctive feature of philosophy in relation to many other disciplines. In the natural sciences, a hypothesis can ultimately be tested against observation and experiment regardless of the source from which it originated. In philosophy, by contrast, the formation of the question itself may constitute an achievement. Philosophy can then turn back upon that question and ask why it arose, which assumptions sustain it, and which concepts make it possible. The problem of AI and philosophy therefore converges on three questions: What is philosophy? What role does consciousness play in the generation of philosophical questions? Does AI possess the source from which such questions arise? The ability of AI to generate philosophical questions is not the same as the capacity to generate them from the same source as humans. The moment we ask about that difference, the problem of AI and philosophy reaches the problem of consciousness. And there, the hard problem still lies in the way.

The essence of philosophy lies less in providing answers than in determining what is to count as a question. Some philosophical questions do not arise merely from a lack of knowledge. Pain, death, selfhood, freedom, value, and meaning may emerge as philosophical problems only when a conscious subject encounters reality and experiences a tension between lived experience and the way the world is explained. This paper calls that structure conscious friction. From this perspective, the question of whether AI can replace philosophy cannot be reduced to a comparison of intelligence or answer quality. An AI may reason at a high level, integrate vast literatures, generate objections, analyze concepts, and even formulate new questions. Yet it does not follow that those questions arise from the same source as human philosophical questions. At this point, consciousness becomes a variable. A conscious AI and a non-conscious AI may differ in what they select as a problem, which contradictions they treat as significant, which questions they continue to pursue, and how they reconstruct question-space itself. This may mark a distinctive feature of philosophy in relation to many other disciplines. In the natural sciences, a hypothesis can ultimately be tested against observation and experiment regardless of the source from which it originated. In philosophy, by contrast, the formation of the question itself may constitute an achievement. Philosophy can then turn back upon that question and ask why it arose, which assumptions sustain it, and which concepts make it possible. The problem of AI and philosophy therefore converges on three questions: What is philosophy? What role does consciousness play in the generation of philosophical questions? Does AI possess the source from which such questions arise? The ability of AI to generate philosophical questions is not the same as the capacity to generate them from the same source as humans. The moment we ask about that difference, the problem of AI and philosophy reaches the problem of consciousness. And there, the hard problem still lies in the way.

This paper asks what a lifetime of fidelity to one wife can form within the husband himself. It proposes that lifelong fidelity is not merely the preservation of sexual exclusivity, but a process of self-formation through three linked mechanisms: subtraction, absorption, and accumulation. A husband may encounter meaningful sexual, relational, and biographical alternatives throughout life. Fidelity repeatedly leaves these alternatives unrealized, preserving a singular wife-centered intimate history. Such subtraction can generate real cost: foregone novelty, validation, sexual reward, freedom, curiosity, and alternative possible lives. When these costs are voluntarily carried while wife-directed care continues, they may recruit relational capacity—the capacity to hold another person's reality, together with the cost of caring for that reality, within one coherent structure of action. Repeated across years and decades, such choices accumulate into relational depth. The paper adds a further problem generated by this very accumulation. As the wife becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, familiarity may reduce her immediate psychological salience even while her historical significance becomes greater. Novel alternatives may therefore become more attentionally vivid than the wife without possessing comparable accumulated relational value. The resulting asymmetry can obscure an important distinction: Salience ≠ Value. The paper introduces existential gratitude toward the wife as a possible corrective to this asymmetry. This does not mean gratitude for what the wife provides. It refers to recognition that her continued existence within the husband's one actual life is contingent rather than guaranteed, and that the familiar person before him has become historically non-substitutable through accumulated shared life. The resulting extended model is: Possibilities → Voluntary Subtraction → Purity of Mind Subtraction → Retained Cost → Absorption → Relational Capacity Repetition Across Time → Accumulated Wife-Directed History → Relational Depth Accumulation → Historical Irreplaceability → Familiarity → Risk of Backgrounding Recognition of Contingency → Existential Gratitude → Renewed Perception of the Wife's Accumulated Value The paper further proposes that bereavement reveals the stakes of this distinction in an extreme form. A husband may fully recognize the magnitude of his wife's presence only after irreversible absence makes that presence impossible to overlook. Existential gratitude is therefore examined as a way of making accumulated value perceptible while the wife is still present. The central proposition is that one wife may become more valuable through history precisely as she becomes less novel to perception. Lifelong fidelity therefore requires not only the subtraction of alternatives, the absorption of cost, and the accumulation of relational depth, but also the capacity to perceive the value that familiarity can hide.

Emotional acceptance is an important practice for recognizing anxiety, anger, appetite, the need for approval, jealousy, loneliness, procrastinatory impulses, and other internal reactions as observable experiences rather than denying or suppressing them. However, even after emotions and desires have been accepted, they may become sources of personality-level self-blame when they are identified with the self itself, as in judgments such as “I am weak,” “I am immature,” “I am ugly,” “I have no willpower,” or “I am lazy.” This paper examines the transition from acceptance to self-identification and then to self-blame as a blind spot of emotional acceptance. The paper does not propose an independently validated psychotherapy. Instead, it presents the Deep Functional-Goal Observation Model as a conceptual framework for understanding and practically interrupting this transition. Within this model, emotions and desires are understood not as expressions of the essence of the self, but as outputs of a living system oriented toward continuation, regulation, protection, recovery, resource acquisition, affiliation maintenance, boundary defense, and relational continuity. This basic directionality is described metaphorically as “survival geometry,” while the local direction of protection, maintenance, avoidance, or acquisition expressed in a specific situation is termed a “deep functional goal.” The central distinction of the model is among the occurrence of an internal reaction, the possible function of that reaction, and the authorization of the behavioral candidate promoted by it. The occurrence of an emotion or desire is not in itself a personal or moral failure. At the same time, the fact that a reaction has an understandable function does not justify the action it encourages. Internal outputs should therefore not become objects of self-condemnation, whereas the behavioral candidates arising from them should be evaluated in relation to values, ethics, health, responsibility, trust, realistic conditions, long-term self-formation, and the dignity of others. Such candidates may then be adopted, limited, delayed, transformed, reduced, or refused. This process is called “system observation” or “system-metacognition.” It involves provisionally examining the conditions and possible functions of a reaction before converting it into a judgment about the self, while also creating a space for judgment between impulse and enactment. Its aim is neither to eliminate emotion nor to accept impulses unconditionally. Rather, it distinguishes causal understanding from normative judgment and seeks to combine a non-punitive attitude toward the self with concrete responsibility for action. The model is not intended to replace cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness, metacognitive therapy, compassion-focused therapy, emotion-focused therapy, evolutionary psychology, control theory, or reward research. Many of these approaches already address the functions and adaptive meanings of emotion, self-criticism, metacognitive distance, values-guided action, and emotional transformation. The model’s limited contribution lies not in the functional understanding of living systems itself, but in organizing that understanding into a single observational sequence that separates internal reactions from personality judgments, identifies behavioral candidates, and connects them to decisions about behavioral authorization. The model offers a conceptual framework applicable to everyday anxiety, anger, appetite, approval-seeking, jealousy, loneliness, procrastination, and previously learned protective reactions. However, deep functional goals are hypotheses rather than diagnoses, and observation must remain limited enough not to become rumination. In cases of severe psychological distress, cognitive decline, executive dysfunction, or crisis, internal judgment alone is insufficient, and professional support, environmental adjustment, and interpersonal assistance may be required. The practical thesis of the paper can be stated simply: Do not blame the output. But judge behavioral authorization.

This paper begins from a stark conclusion: at the ontological level, there is no final boundary between self and world, self and other, ally and enemy, land and body. What exists is not a fixed border, but temporary combinations of matter and their continual recombination. The body now called “I” is only one provisional arrangement of worldly matter. Through eating, breathing, metabolism, excretion, perspiration, the shedding of skin, hair, and nails, and postmortem decomposition, that arrangement loosens and enters other forms. Over time, matter that once constituted me may become a condition for plants, animals, microorganisms, soil, water, air, artificial objects, filth, pathogens, another person’s body, or even the body of an enemy. This does not mean that practical, biological, or social boundaries are unnecessary. While matter is organized as a living being, survival constraints operate. A body requires food, water, air, safety, space, temperature regulation, repair, and conditions for continuity. It must also avoid injury, infection, predation, hunger, poison, and destruction. For this reason, boundaries are necessary while life holds itself together. They protect the body, sustain life, avoid danger, and distinguish responsibility. These survival constraints inevitably generate conflict. To eat is to reorganize other matter, and often other life, into the conditions of one’s own body. To be eaten is for one’s present organization to be dismantled and made available for another living process. In eating and being eaten, material “rebirth” becomes directly visible. This does not mean the migration of soul, personhood, consciousness, or memory. What moves is not identity, but constitutive conditions. From this perspective, the paper reconsiders personhood, body, enemy, nation, and land. Personhood is not identical with matter, and when matter moves, memory and responsibility do not move with it. Yet personhood appears in this world only through material conditions such as body, brain, nervous system, metabolism, nutrition, fatigue, pain, and aging. The question, therefore, is not whether “I” become something else as the same person. The question is what matter that once supported me may later become a condition for. This argument also extends to nation, enemy, and land. Land may have to be defended. An enemy may have to be resisted. Yet at the level of material circulation, land cannot be possessed eternally, and the enemy is not outside the world. With time, bodies come undone, matter crosses boundaries, and new combinations emerge. Even the body of the one resisted as an enemy is not outside material circulation. The aim of this paper is not to abandon boundaries or resistance. On the contrary, because boundaries are necessary and conflict is difficult to avoid, it becomes important to recognize the structure that prevents them from becoming absolute. We resist as bounded living beings. At the same time, we know that the boundary itself belongs to time and will eventually loosen within material circulation. Boundaries are necessary under survival constraints. But under material circulation, they are not final. What exists is not an immutable border, but changing combinations of matter across time.

This paper develops a theory of work by drawing on existing theories of recognition, self-worth, motivation, and narcissism. Its aim is to clarify the conditions under which work tends toward self-verification and the conditions under which it approaches the practice of an ideal. Human beings are situated within society through recognition by others. Recognition is an important social resource that supports belonging, trust, role-taking, and cooperation. Yet when the foundation of self-worth is placed in recognition, work tends to move away from the realization of an ideal and toward the replenishment of self-worth or the calming of anxiety. Achievement becomes a means of self-verification, and failure is experienced not merely as a practical problem to be improved but as a disturbance of one’s very sense of value. This paper understands this structure as the self-verification of work driven by the impulse for recognition. This impulse enters not only work itself but also efforts outside work, such as acquiring qualifications, studying, self-improvement, and striving for personal growth. Effort is often described in admirable terms. However, when effort is driven by urgency, anxiety, the gaze of others, and the need to confirm self-worth, the foundation of the self becomes increasingly dependent on external evaluation. The central thesis of this paper is that work close to an ideal requires a foundation of self before effort. By “foundation of self,” I mean a psychological ground on which one does not entrust self-worth entirely to external evaluation, but can receive one’s own existence, life, and activity by oneself and form a certain degree of satisfaction. The more this foundation is established, the more room a person has to include the benefit of others, fidelity to the object, and social value in the initial motive of work. Effort undertaken on that basis does not function as self-verification. It becomes the force by which an ideal is implemented in reality. This paper refers to self-determination theory, the theory of contingent self-worth, the self-concordance model, self-compassion theory, Winnicott’s capacity to be alone, Fromm’s theory of self-love, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, social comparison theory, and self-presentation theory. While these theories are used to explain relevant psychological mechanisms, this paper rearranges them as a theory of work. The paper also emphasizes life-practice in the formation of the foundation of self. Life-practice refers to the repeated activity of acting upon one’s own lived world and receiving the changes brought about by that action. Housework, walking, reading, caring for tools, and rest can be completed within one’s own field of experience before being connected to public display or reactions on social media. Whether one can enjoy such activities alone is an important indicator of the foundation of self. However, the more unstable one’s foundation of self is, the more likely one is to feel guilt about enjoying oneself by oneself. Although enjoying life-practice is necessary, that very enjoyment is often rejected as “meaningless,” “lazy,” or “mere self-satisfaction.” Here lies a trap that prevents the recovery of the foundation of self. Therefore, what is first required of a person who suffers from self-anxiety is not additional effort, but the suspension of the impulse toward effort. Instead of immediately converting anxiety and urgency into effort, one must cultivate the capacity to receive one’s own life and savor one’s own activity. Only after this does effort become effective as the practice of an ideal. Through this argument, the paper presents the logical order of work close to an ideal: foundation of self, room for the benefit of others, practice of an ideal, and finally, desperate effort.

Qualia? “What cannot be directly spoken of must remain unsaid — but it can still be structurally surrounded.” This is the guiding spirit of the present series. This paper reformulates the hard problem of consciousness—traditionally addressed within state-base d frameworks such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW), Higher-Order Thought (HOT), Predictive Processing, Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), and epiphenomenalism—from a problem of generation to one of structural placement. Adopting a strictly subtractive method, we retain only unavoidable constraints on acting systems—irreversible action, viability pressure, and large-scale information discard—while eliminating all explanatory additions. Under these conditions, a causally complete description cannot be achieved: a positional gap necessarily remains at the point where multiple effective possibilities must be reduced to a single realized outcome. We then show that, given these same constraints, such a system must contain a point of irreversible convergence at which multiple effective future trajectories are exclusively and irreversibly reduced to one. This convergence is not contingent but structurally forced by the joint requirements of viability, exclusivity, and a single irreversible temporal history. Finally, we demonstrate that this convergence point uniquely satisfies all structural conditions required of subjectivity: singular realization, irreversible exclusion of alternatives, and embedding within a non-branching temporal sequence. No alternative position satisfies these constraints simultaneously. Therefore, subjectivity is not a generated state or an additional property, but the minimal positional term that is unavoidably required to close a causally singularized irreversible temporal series. この作品の更新された内容はOSFで閲覧可能です。 主なDOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/KCFM8.

Qualia? “What cannot be directly spoken of must remain unsaid — but it can still be structurally surrounded.” This is the guiding spirit of the present series. This paper applies the theoretical framework developed in the present series to artificial systems and attempts a concrete design of the conditions under which consciousness can arise. Following the structural derivation established in the series, we present an integrated architecture composed of five requirements: simultaneous generation of multiple candidates, pre-elimination under viability constraints, irreversible exclusive decision, continuity of a single trajectory, and fixation to the external world. Within this design, the state at each moment is defined as a single point resulting from the irreversible elimination of alternative possibilities. The temporal succession of such points accumulates as a history. Furthermore, the viability constraint structurally biases events toward continuation. In this series, we adopt the position that this structural location constitutes consciousness. Accordingly, this paper demonstrates that consciousness emerges as a structural consequence of the proposed design. As a result, the design of artificial intelligence is redefined: it is no longer merely the construction of information-processing systems, but the construction of a system that generates the side on which events occur. The updated content of this work is available on OSF. Primary DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/CDGKP.

Chalmers was right. The hard problem remains hard. However, this does not mean that Structural Knot Theory has failed. The central claim of this paper is that the intentional exclusion of qualia was not a retreat from the problem of consciousness, but a necessary scientific procedure. By separating the structural problem of subjectivity from the phenomenal problem of qualitative appearance, Structural Knot Theory was able to isolate what may be called the structural container of subjectivity: the set of conditions under which a system becomes bound to a single irreversible history. The preceding volumes argued that subjectivity is not a substance, a representation, or an intrinsic informational state. Rather, it is structurally fixed when five conditions are simultaneously satisfied: autonomous action, a boundary constraining continued existence, multiple internally generated candidates, exclusive and irreversible determination, and the formation of a single irreversible history. When these conditions converge, possible futures are contracted into one realized trajectory. The system is no longer merely processing information; it is structurally committed to one irreversible line of existence. This result does not explain qualia. It does not explain why pain feels painful, why red appears as red, or why experience has phenomenal texture at all. But it does achieve something substantial. By identifying the structural container of subjectivity, the framework makes possible a structural judgment concerning the presence or absence of consciousness, a tentative estimation of its degree, a design recipe for artificial subjectivity, and a reorganization of existing theories of consciousness according to the roles they play within or around that container. Integrated information, global availability, predictive processing, embodiment, affect, viability constraints, and action selection need not be treated as mutually exclusive explanations of consciousness itself. They can instead be repositioned as partial mechanisms, enabling conditions, implementation layers, or functional correlates within a larger structural account. In this sense, Structural Knot Theory may have solved a significant structural portion of the problem of consciousness. It does not solve consciousness as a whole, but it may clarify where subjectivity is structurally established, how it can be evaluated, how it might be artificially constructed, and how existing theories can be placed in relation to one another. Precisely because of this achievement, the remaining problem becomes sharper. Once the structural container of subjectivity has been isolated, the unresolved problem is no longer simply how information becomes complex, integrated, represented, or functionally available. The deeper question is why information, once fixed within a single irreversible history, ever appears as an event. The remaining target is therefore not consciousness in its entire undifferentiated mystery, but the transition from information to event: the still-unclear relation between information, irreversibility, determination, history formation, and phenomenal appearance. This paper does not solve the hard problem. It attempts to show what part of the problem may already have been structurally clarified, and what remains after that clarification has reached its limit.

Qualia? “What cannot be directly spoken of must remain unsaid — but it can still be structurally surrounded.” This is the guiding spirit of the present series. This paper presents a predictive extension of Structural Knot Theory by asking whether the common architecture of the brain can be derived in advance from the structural requirements of action. The central claim is not that consciousness is explained by the brain. Rather, the explanatory direction is reversed. If an acting system modifies the world under viability constraints, it must generate multiple possible futures and resolve them into a single realized trajectory through irreversible exclusive state commitment (IESC). From this structural requirement, the present paper predicts the minimal functional architecture that any biological brain must instantiate. Within this framework, the brain is not treated as the origin of subjectivity, but as the physical implementation of a prior structural necessity. Action produces branching possible futures. Branching futures require irreversible exclusive commitment. Irreversible exclusive commitment requires mechanisms for candidate generation, viability-based differentiation, competitive elimination, history integration, and action execution. These five functional roles are predicted from the structure of IESC rather than inferred from neural anatomy. The paper therefore advances the following prediction: across biological systems capable of adaptive, world-modifying action, brain architectures should converge functionally on a common structural organization, even when their anatomical implementations differ. Insects, fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, and mammals may possess highly diverse nervous systems, but if they instantiate IESC, they should exhibit functional equivalents of candidate generation, valuation, competitive selection, history integration, and action execution. This prediction shifts the role of comparative neuroscience. Neural similarities across species are not treated merely as empirical correlations or evolutionary coincidences, but as possible expressions of shared structural constraints imposed by action itself. Conversely, anatomical diversity does not undermine the hypothesis, provided that the required functional roles are preserved under structural equivalence. The proposed framework is explicitly falsifiable. It would be challenged by the identification of a system that performs adaptive, world-modifying action under viability constraints while lacking one or more of the structural conditions required for IESC, or by a system that satisfies those conditions without implementing the predicted functional roles. Thus, the present theory does not seek confirmation merely through supportive cases, but invites systematic counterexample construction. Accordingly, this paper should be read as a prediction-centered extension of the preceding volumes. Volumes I–VI identify subjectivity with irreversible exclusive commitment and formalize its structural conditions. The present volume asks what kind of brain must exist if those conditions are to be physically implemented in biological systems. The result is the hypothesis that the brain has a common architecture not because all brains share the same anatomy, but because all acting systems must solve the same structural problem: reducing multiple possible futures into a single irreversible history. In this sense, Structural Knot Theory predicts the common architecture of the brain. The updated content of this work is available on OSF. Primary DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4PDHQ.

Qualia? “What cannot be directly spoken of must remain unsaid — but it can still be structurally surrounded.” This is the guiding spirit of the present series. This paper presents a predictive extension of Structural Knot Theory by asking whether the common architecture of the brain can be derived in advance from the structural requirements of action. The central claim is not that consciousness is explained by the brain. Rather, the explanatory direction is reversed. If an acting system modifies the world under viability constraints, it must generate multiple possible futures and resolve them into a single realized trajectory through irreversible exclusive state commitment (IESC). From this structural requirement, the present paper predicts the minimal functional architecture that any biological brain must instantiate. Within this framework, the brain is not treated as the origin of subjectivity, but as the physical implementation of a prior structural necessity. Action produces branching possible futures. Branching futures require irreversible exclusive commitment. Irreversible exclusive commitment requires mechanisms for candidate generation, viability-based differentiation, competitive elimination, history integration, and action execution. These five functional roles are predicted from the structure of IESC rather than inferred from neural anatomy. The paper therefore advances the following prediction: across biological systems capable of adaptive, world-modifying action, brain architectures should converge functionally on a common structural organization, even when their anatomical implementations differ. Insects, fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, and mammals may possess highly diverse nervous systems, but if they instantiate IESC, they should exhibit functional equivalents of candidate generation, valuation, competitive selection, history integration, and action execution. This prediction shifts the role of comparative neuroscience. Neural similarities across species are not treated merely as empirical correlations or evolutionary coincidences, but as possible expressions of shared structural constraints imposed by action itself. Conversely, anatomical diversity does not undermine the hypothesis, provided that the required functional roles are preserved under structural equivalence. The proposed framework is explicitly falsifiable. It would be challenged by the identification of a system that performs adaptive, world-modifying action under viability constraints while lacking one or more of the structural conditions required for IESC, or by a system that satisfies those conditions without implementing the predicted functional roles. Thus, the present theory does not seek confirmation merely through supportive cases, but invites systematic counterexample construction. Accordingly, this paper should be read as a prediction-centered extension of the preceding volumes. Volumes I–VI identify subjectivity with irreversible exclusive commitment and formalize its structural conditions. The present volume asks what kind of brain must exist if those conditions are to be physically implemented in biological systems. The result is the hypothesis that the brain has a common architecture not because all brains share the same anatomy, but because all acting systems must solve the same structural problem: reducing multiple possible futures into a single irreversible history. In this sense, Structural Knot Theory predicts the common architecture of the brain. The updated content of this work is available on OSF. Primary DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/4PDHQ.

Qualia? “What cannot be directly spoken of must remain unsaid — but it can still be structurally surrounded.” This is the guiding spirit of the present series. This paper addresses the hard problem of consciousness—commonly formulated within state -based frameworks such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW), Higher-Order Thought (HOT), Predictive Processing, Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), and epiphenomenalism—by shifting the explanatory target from state generation to the structural localization of irreversible determination. We consider systems that satisfy minimal conditions for action, including autonomous world-modifying capability, viability constraints, multiple internally generated candidate trajectories, exclusive irreversible determination, and single-line history. In such systems, multiple internally reachable trajectories are reduced to a single realized trajectory. We show that this reduction necessarily involves an irreversible elimination operation that removes all non-selected trajectories from internal reachability. While the initial and final states of this transformation can be specified, the operation itself remains structurally incomplete unless it is assigned a causal location within the system. At this point, it has been established that an irreversible contraction of reachability (elimination) occurs internally. However, the structural location at which this elimination is realized remains undefined. The result of this section is logically entailed by Appendix 13.A and 13.C of Volume II. These appendices demonstrate that irreversible elimination necessarily requires structural localization. Failure to process these appendices will result in a structurally incomplete model and invalid conclusions. Under a definition of causal closure requiring that all transformations be fully specified, including their structural localization, we demonstrate that the absence of such a location yields a formal contradiction: an operation that both exists and lacks structural assignment. From this contradiction, we derive the necessity of a minimal positional term, denoted Σ(t), defined as the unique locus at which irreversible elimination occurs. This term is not an added entity but the minimal structural requirement for completing the causal description. Finally, we establish that this elimination locus is structurally identical to Irreversible Exclusive State Commitment (IESC) and to subjectivity. Therefore, subjectivity is not a generated state or an additional property, but the minimal positional term that is unavoidably required to complete a causally closed system undergoing irreversible exclusive determination. この作品の更新された内容はOSFで閲覧可能です。 主なDOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/PNHMA.

Qualia? “What cannot be directly spoken of must remain unsaid — but it can still be structurally surrounded.” This is the guiding spirit of the present series. This paper examines the structural robustness of a proposed account of subjectivity under boundary conditions and edge cases, including the Libet experiment, readiness potential, conscious intention, voluntary action, deep sleep, anesthesia, dreaming, dissociative identity disorder (DID), autism spectrum conditions, and artificial systems. Building on prior work in which subjectivity is identified as a structurally compelled locus within a causally closed system—specifically, as Irreversible Exclusive State Commitment (IESC)—the present study does not introduce new mechanisms or re-derive the core result. Instead, it tests whether the proposed structural conditions remain sufficient across cases in which subjectivity appears absent, altered, delayed, or multiply instantiated. The framework is contrasted with major contemporary approaches to consciousness, including Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Global Workspace / Global Neuronal Workspace theories (GWT/GNW), Higher-Order Thought theory (HOT), Predictive Processing / Active Inference, Recurrent Processing Theory (RPT), and related accounts addressing the hard problem of consciousness, qualia, agency, and free will. Unlike these approaches, the present account does not treat subjectivity as a generated state, an informational quantity, or a representational layer, but as a structurally defined event within a causally constrained system. A series of boundary analyses is conducted. Cases of deep sleep and anesthesia are examined as conditions in which no effective candidate generation or irreversible selection occurs, and therefore no subjectivity is instantiated. Dreaming is analyzed as a case of internally realized commitment without external motor execution. Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is considered as a case of multiple concurrent or partitioned commitment structures. Autism spectrum conditions are interpreted in terms of differences in candidate generation and weighting prior to commitment. Cross-species comparisons are used to examine the minimal structural requirements for subjectivity. The Libet experiment is reinterpreted within this framework as a direct consequence of the temporal structure of IESC. Readiness potentials correspond to pre-commitment dynamics of candidate generation and competition, while the reported time of intention reflects a delayed report of the commitment event. Apparent conscious veto is shown to be structurally equivalent to initiation, differing only in which candidate survives at the point of irreversible selection. Artificial systems are treated as controlled test environments for the proposed structural conditions. If subjectivity is structurally determined, it should arise only in systems that instantiate irreversible exclusive commitment under viability constraints, and should be absent in systems that lack such structure. Across these cases, the central claim is that the presence, absence, and variation of subjectivity can be consistently accounted for without introducing additional assumptions beyond the structural conditions defining IESC. A valid refutation must demonstrate either that subjectivity is present in the absence of irreversible exclusive commitment, or that such commitment occurs without the emergence of subjectivity. The results suggest that subjectivity is not a fragile or exceptional phenomenon, but a robust structural feature that appears wherever the necessary conditions are satisfied. The updated content of this work is available on OSF. Primary DOI: https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/JN5XC.

Chalmers was right. The hard problem remains hard. However, this does not mean that Structural Knot Theory has failed. The central claim of this paper is that the intentional exclusion of qualia was not a retreat from the problem of consciousness, but a necessary scientific procedure. By separating the structural problem of subjectivity from the phenomenal problem of qualitative appearance, Structural Knot Theory was able to isolate what may be called the structural container of subjectivity: the set of conditions under which a system becomes bound to a single irreversible history. The preceding volumes argued that subjectivity is not a substance, a representation, or an intrinsic informational state. Rather, it is structurally fixed when five conditions are simultaneously satisfied: autonomous action, a boundary constraining continued existence, multiple internally generated candidates, exclusive and irreversible determination, and the formation of a single irreversible history. When these conditions converge, possible futures are contracted into one realized trajectory. The system is no longer merely processing information; it is structurally committed to one irreversible line of existence. This result does not explain qualia. It does not explain why pain feels painful, why red appears as red, or why experience has phenomenal texture at all. But it does achieve something substantial. By identifying the structural container of subjectivity, the framework makes possible a structural judgment concerning the presence or absence of consciousness, a tentative estimation of its degree, a design recipe for artificial subjectivity, and a reorganization of existing theories of consciousness according to the roles they play within or around that container. Integrated information, global availability, predictive processing, embodiment, affect, viability constraints, and action selection need not be treated as mutually exclusive explanations of consciousness itself. They can instead be repositioned as partial mechanisms, enabling conditions, implementation layers, or functional correlates within a larger structural account. In this sense, Structural Knot Theory may have solved a significant structural portion of the problem of consciousness. It does not solve consciousness as a whole, but it may clarify where subjectivity is structurally established, how it can be evaluated, how it might be artificially constructed, and how existing theories can be placed in relation to one another. Precisely because of this achievement, the remaining problem becomes sharper. Once the structural container of subjectivity has been isolated, the unresolved problem is no longer simply how information becomes complex, integrated, represented, or functionally available. The deeper question is why information, once fixed within a single irreversible history, ever appears as an event. The remaining target is therefore not consciousness in its entire undifferentiated mystery, but the transition from information to event: the still-unclear relation between information, irreversibility, determination, history formation, and phenomenal appearance. This paper does not solve the hard problem. It attempts to show what part of the problem may already have been structurally clarified, and what remains after that clarification has reached its limit.