Michael Lehotay

Physicalism says that experience is physical, but does not select the physical occurrence with which it should be identified. Even a theory committed to identity must specify its candidate and justify treating physical and experiential descriptions as descriptions of one particular occurrence. This is the identification problem. Classical identity theory shows why differences in meaning or access do not by themselves rule out identity. Strawson's identification of experience, subject, content, and physical process supplies a direct precedent for process-subject identity. Neither result establishes which physical token is the experience, where its boundaries lie, or which changes preserve it. This paper distinguishes identification from the explanatory gap, neural correlation, and the bearer question. It proposes a comparative, defeasible case based on independently constrained correspondence in boundary, duration, unity, qualitative organization, persistence, and causal or counterfactual profile. Mismatch, circular individuation, or a better rival explanation would weaken a proposed identification. Convergence alone is insufficient: constitution and realization may explain the same evidence, leaving the relation underdetermined. Informational Experiential Realism supplies a test case: one qualifying physical operation is proposed as the total experience and its subject. The paper does not assume that this candidate succeeds. Its contribution is a framework for assessing particular identity claims that remains useful if IER is rejected. Physical instantiation, qualitative correspondence, and the comparative warrant for the proposed identity remain open.

Several recent theories of consciousness describe experience through combinations of constraint, closure, admissibility, integration, persistence, temporal extension, identity maintenance, and subject individuation. Their shared vocabulary suggests a useful comparison, but it does not establish a school or a common ontology. This article therefore treats the works as a provisional comparison set. It asks whether they share an explanatory reorientation: before explaining particular conscious contents or their functional availability, explain what makes there be one bounded and persisting subject whose experience they are. The article distinguishes six claims often compressed into the language of a subject or bearer: attribution, phenomenal subjectivity, synchronic unity, ontological bearing, diachronic identity, and substantial subjecthood. It then compares identity-and-closure theories, persistence-and-admissibility theories, relational and temporal-structure theories, and consciousness-first structural ontologies. These approaches differ over whether structural organization is identical with experience and subject, constitutes a subject, realizes consciousness, supplies a diagnostic criterion, or organizes an already experiential basis. IER v10.11.6 supplies one sharpened comparator: a continuing token UEF operation is identical with total experience-as-process and the experiential subject, while substrate, capacity, regime, local contents, organism, and person remain distinct types. IER also permits independently qualifying UEFs at physically nested or overlapping scales without phenomenal aggregation. These commitments do not define the comparison set or establish the identity claim; they clarify which questions any subject theory must answer. The article concludes with standards for testing the proposed convergence through primary-text comparison, explicit inference, contrast cases, and failure conditions.

What makes interacting physical processes one experiencing subject, and what allows that subject to persist as its activities and constituents change? Informational Experiential Realism (IER) proposes that one qualifying physical operation is both a total experience and its subject. This paper develops the proposal by separating physical unity, constitutive membership, and continuity before considering experiential identity. The physical account proceeds from available continuation to unity, ownership, membership, and persistence. Unity requires that the candidate's alternatives resist independent recombination across every division in a physically justified partition family. Ownership asks whether the joint restriction is borne and resolved within the candidate. Membership distinguishes processes that participate in that resolution from those that merely influence or sustain it. Persistence requires produced continuation that inherits irreversible consequences and remains unique in both directions. The full criteria permit turnover and content change while ruling out continuation through a failed link, branching, or merger. IER identifies the qualifying operation with experience and its subject; qualitative differences are proposed to be differences within that operation. The identification is defended as an explanatory hypothesis, not a deduction from physicalism. Strawson's identity theory and cybernetic and process approaches supply substantial precedents. The contribution is an explicit framework and its conditional consequences. Whether a physical system meets the criteria, whether it is experiential, which organizations correspond to particular qualities, and whether identity is preferable to constitution or realization remain open.

Informational Experiential Realism (IER) is a theory of experience as a physical regime of globally integrated intrinsic constraint. Just as lasers and superconductivity appear only under specific physical conditions, IER argues that experience exists only when matter enters a specific organizational regime. IER develops a structural model of experience grounded in admissible futures, collapse, continuity, and the irreversible organization of constraint across time. This volume presents the core identity claim, the essential structural framework, and the interpretive boundaries that define the theory’s scope. Experience is not produced. It is not represented. It is not computed. It is informational unity under intrinsic constraint.