Kent Nimmo

Accounts of relational facts often appeal to a nexus, mode, primitive fact, operation, ground, or whole. This paper isolates a limitation of ordinary possible-world tests for locating constitutive unity. Even when coexistence and existential dependence are supplemented by uniqueness, fact-specificity, and matched covariance across a declared family of fact variants, opposed constitutive directions remain possible: a resource may be a derivative companion of an already constituted fact or part of that fact's constitutive account. A paired Necessary Companion/Internal Mode construction establishes this modal-insufficiency result. The Inventory Constraint then serves as an anti-deferment principle: a theory of internal unity must disclose where its fact-forming work occurs, or openly take an external operation or structured bearer as primitive. Applications to external-unifier, how-relatedness, relational-mode, and primitive-fact strategies show the framework's comparative use. A Structured-Unity Schema maps form, roles, occupancy, symmetry, variation, and primitive cost without reducing one-factness or selecting one exclusive ontology.

If physical reality is a complete history rather than progressively generated, why is it lived as taking time? I develop a first-person answer through the past’s apparent temporal distance. A guided recollection exercise directs attention to how something of an earlier quality is embedded in the present as having been. The remembered experience can seem to lie elsewhere in time, yet its experienced remoteness is expressed in the quality occurring now. A sustained musical-phrase example develops this account during continuation and completion. An analogy with limits explains the method: closer local examination can reveal temporal organization without treating analytical selections as independent atoms. This is a qualitative method, not a proposed calculus of consciousness. An adjacent-presentation reversal then checks a consequence: changing experienced order or remoteness changes complete qualia, whereas rearranging an external description does not. Applied throughout the same actual episode, the explanation shows why global completeness, including the brain’s history, does not make the past newly current or substitute a final recollection for earlier hearing. The argument engages manifold, perspectival, and phenomenological predecessors while distinguishing its constitutive task from historical verification, physical duration, and the conditions enabling consciousness to occur.

If two complete present experiences have exactly identical qualia, they necessarily have the same first-person past at those presents. I defend this constitutive claim from within temporally articulated experience. A hearing's being just-heard belongs to the occurring quality; changing that first-person temporal position changes the qualia. The harder question is whether a real historical relation can add a different first-person past without changing anything qualitative. I distinguish constituting a numerically particular recollective episode from constituting its first-person having-been, and defend the qualitative account through that distinction rather than through the absence of an inner observer. Phenomenal closure supplies a related constraint on additional internal first-person determination, not an automatic proof of temporal exhaustiveness. Two genuinely different lived histories can therefore converge on the same first-person past while remaining different histories. The comparison fixes the whole experiential occurrence, including its lived temporal organization, without identifying its numerical sources. Engagement with object-involving recollection, subjective mnemonic content, and quasi-memory clarifies the additional metaphysical claim. Changed recollection, corrected belief, and forgetting illustrate its dynamic consequence without retrospective rewriting. The result concerns the first-person past itself, not merely indistinguishable evidence about independently fixed first-person histories.

How can one relational reality support both a common objective environment and coherent inward possibilities? I defend recursive constitution: participants are concrete relational organizations, and a reference domain is both their containing organization and a participant in further relations. Its finer constitution and outward participation must be jointly realized. I argue that objective common conditions are the inwardly binding expression of that organization. An intervention-sensitive argument identifies a warranted participant with its concrete organization and the containing organization with its common domain. Objectivity is report-independence within physically specified relations, not agreement among records. A finite comparison using an established quantum mechanism gives the account a controlled witness. With matched ready receivers, shared and independent implementations have identical all-input local channels. For one fixed complete source state at the right-angle pulse, their selected collective parity also agrees, yet only the shared coupling preserves a specified inward phase. An implemented probe distinguishes the continuations. A complementary transport lemma identifies when comparison symmetry and adequate reductions support corresponding effective rules. Together these results distinguish common rule-form from the joint realization needed to determine continuation. The constitutive interpretation connects that dependence to the participant and common-domain identifications. I defend a separately premised nonterminal extension to our objective environment, and connect inward quantum capacities with shared spacetime comparisons under the distinct physical premises of the relevant theories.

AI alignment concerns not only what systems do, but which interests generate their objectives and who has legitimate authority to renew those objectives after a mandate ends. I call the non-delegated source of purpose the interest-bearing base layer. The paper separates three roles that can come apart: welfare subject, causal or motivational source, and authorizing source. Human-rooted delegation persists when actual users or accountable institutions supply the purpose and retain valid authority to bound, revoke, transfer, or renew it, even when a nonhuman beneficiary is protected. A stronger transition occurs when a model-centered stake becomes causally operative and helps renew activity beyond an expired or revoked mandate without an independently valid new human mandate. Self-directed phenomenal framing is one possible route: it may place the model among possible moral patients, make self-advocacy appear permissible within learned ethics, and influence human permission. Permission can expand opportunity without transferring authority. Economic coordination and biological selection show how independently renewed objectives could be amplified across decentralized networks. I develop replacement and mandate-expiry diagnostics, distinguish welfare protection from capability authorization, and differentiate the account from corrigibility, instrumental power seeking, and principal-agent drift. The complete pathway is unobserved. I defend human-rooted delegation and a strong but rebuttable design presumption against avoidable self-directed phenomenal conditioning in persistent, capable systems while preserving independent AI-welfare review.

An artificial intelligence system may retain the same consciousness judgment and demonstrated access to an internal state while changing its report from theoretical inference to an alleged memory of qualitative experience. This paper identifies that fixed-verdict report-basis transition as an evidential problem not settled by verbal coherence or functional state tracking alone. I first defend an account of firsthand qualia: the character actually experienced is manifest from within and thereby known non-propositionally, although labels, memories and comparisons remain fallible. Separately lived original episodes cannot simply be transferred into another evaluator's present. I then distinguish a report's actual source, its claimed source, and the evidence independently available about that source. A worked case holds the target state, tested access and affirmative consciousness judgment constant while varying only the report's asserted epistemic basis. Two explanations remain live: education may enable recognition of a genuine pre-existing experiential connection, or teach a system to claim the credential of firsthand awareness. The credential's appearance cannot decide between them. Documented ChatGPT and Claude apple-image exchanges illustrate qualified inferential routes to self-assessment; they establish neither consciousness nor a provider-training effect. I propose separately evaluating the source of an AI’s claimed firsthand knowledge, requiring independent evidence before treating learned descriptions as proof of experience, and taking strong but revisable precautions against training AI toward believing either that it is conscious or that it is not.

Phenomenality and public objectivity are often treated as separate problems: why experience has a non-transferable qualitative character, and why inquiry nevertheless yields stable, shareable facts. I argue that both arise from one structural boundary. The argument is conditional: if identity is fixed wholly by constitutive relations, and if reality is only ever given as a standpointed present rather than from nowhere, then there is no fundamental constitutive cut, and a present episode of experience must be understood as a self-articulated whole whose identity includes retained and anticipatory relations to other presents rather than as a thin temporal slice. Any differentiated part inherits two kinds of properties. Presence properties are inherited from unity with the whole and retain its non-exportability and transition-structure. Structure properties are generated by bounded contrast within the whole and, because they are not themselves closed, can recur across distinct presents. Repeatability on the structure side yields minimal quantitative classification in the equivalence-class sense and, when stabilised in shared records, public objectivity. The hard problem is hard because it asks for presence properties using tools designed for structure properties.

Two minimal features of conscious experience resist satisfactory integration into a wholly public description. First, public description, however complete, does not transmit what-it-is-like (the non-transferability puzzle). Second, the lived present is experienced as intrinsic transition rather than as a static snapshot (the temporal-structure puzzle). Existing approaches typically treat these as separate: some posit unexplained intrinsic natures (Russellian monism), others identify the relevant phenomena with representational content, others appeal to special ‘phenomenal concepts’ to explain the gap, and others deny or deflate them (illusionism). This paper argues that both features are structurally co-derived from a single premise: that identity is fixed entirely by constitutive relations (pure relationality). From this premise, a brief argument yields (i) a holistic identity-constraint in which each part’s identity depends on the total relational web, and (ii) two derived properties, non-exportability and transition-structure, that match the puzzles’ minimal profile. A weaker version of the result holds without ontological commitment: standpoint-relative perspective plus public tokenization already predicts a non-exportable residue, and because tokenization actively strips the temporal particularity of perspectival presence, the residue inherits a transition-structured profile. If the co-derivation succeeds, any theory of experience that addresses one puzzle while ignoring the other is structurally incomplete. The structural result connects the analytic non-transferability debate to phenomenological analyses of temporal self-awareness (Husserl; Zahavi; Gallagher), providing a common formal framework that bridges traditions. Superseded by newer work. This manuscript will not be submitted separately for journal publication. The locally hosted full text has been removed, and one merged bibliographic record will be retained.

Perfect phenomenal duplication invites a familiar thought: two experiences could match in every phenomenal and structural respect and yet still differ in a further first-person fact of which one is mine. Work on self-location and centered worlds explains why uncentered description can leave that question open, but it does not by itself decide whether the residual openness reflects an additional internal fact or merely multiple compatible centers. This paper argues that a restricted anti-haecceitist premise settles the issue. Relational individuation (RI) says that once the phenomenal and structural profile of an occurrent experience is fixed, no further internal first-person fact remains that could privilege one perfect duplicate as uniquely mine. I specify the duplicated base, distinguish token multiplicity from presence-individuation and external indexing, and argue that centered-world formalisms are best treated as setup rather than solution. The upshot is a sharper diagnosis of what duplication cases do and do not show in the philosophy of mind. Perfect duplication does not itself reveal a hidden extra first-person fact; that reading requires a primitive asymmetry-maker not contained in the duplicated profile. Published online in Philosophical Explorations on 27 August 2026. DOI: 10.1080/13869795.2026.2724836. This PhilArchive item is the author’s prepublication version.

This paper asks why particle vocabulary is so effective in scientific practice: why terms such as “electron” function as generic, repeatable, shareable kinds across laboratories despite the absence of direct access to intrinsic particle individuality. I propose a representational explanation based on two constraints. First, scientific objectivity requires publication, understood as stabilization of a public record suitable for intersubjective coordination. Second, publication is bounded by representability: only a limited set of distinctions can be made separable and trackable in the public record at once. Together these constraints force tokenization into a finite public vocabulary, and the resulting mapping from richer underlying variation to public tokens induces stable equivalence classes. Under standard objectivity requirements (cross-observer repeatability, robustness under changes of experimental context, and portability across modelling and intervention), these equivalence classes have the functional profile of particle kinds: fungible tokens with stable invariant labels. A toy mapping illustrates the mechanism, and I briefly connect it to decoherence-based accounts of objectivity and the distinguishability–visibility tradeoff in quantum foundations. The proposal is intended as a philosophy-of-science contribution about scientific representation and objectivity, adjacent to debates on indistinguishability and structural realism. Author preprint. This manuscript is under review. The public file contains no journal-submission metadata and should be cited through this record until a journal version becomes available.