Michael Lehotay

Physicalism says that experience is physical. It does not by itself tell us which physical occurrence experience is. Even after a theory chooses identity rather than causation, realization, constitution, emergence, or correlation as the psychophysical relation, a further question remains: what would justify treating an experiential description and a description of a particular physical process as descriptions of one token? I call this the identification problem. Classical identity theorists established that differences in meaning or mode of access do not rule out numerical identity between experience and physical activity. That result makes psychophysical identity possible but does not select the physical relatum. Strawson extends the strategy by explicitly identifying an experience, its thin subject, its content, and a bounded physical process. His proposal shows both that physical process-subject identity has a direct precedent and that a typed identity formula does not settle the token's boundary, temporal grain, or persistence conditions. The paper distinguishes the identification problem from the explanatory gap, the neural-correlate problem, and the bearer question. It proposes that an identity claim gains support through convergent, independently constrained correspondence in boundary, duration, internal organization, persistence, causal and counterfactual structure, and qualitative variation. Systematic mismatch, circular individuation, overgeneration or undergeneration, and a better rival explanation would weaken the proposal. Informational Experiential Realism supplies one explicitly typed test case: a token Unified Experiential Field operation through a continuity interval is proposed as numerically identical with total experience-as-process and the experiential subject. The paper does not assume that this candidate succeeds. Its aim is to state what would have to be true for any such psychophysical identification to be warranted.

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 v10.11.3 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.

Informational Experiential Realism (IER) proposes that a token physical operation under coherent intrinsic constraint is numerically identical with one total experience and its experiential subject. The subject is the continuing operation through changes in its contents and material participants, rather than an enduring owner receiving separately produced experiences. This paper presents the framework's core: physically admissible continuation, differentiated unity, ownership, constitutive membership, and numerical persistence. Synchronic unity requires non-factorizable successor support across every independently declared physically meaningful partition. Ownership concerns where that joint continuation problem is internally borne; membership requires contribution, bearing, joint resolution, later uptake, and common physical typing. Persistence requires continuous closure, operational successor production, effective consequence inheritance, operation-mediated change, and unique continuation in both directions. Failure of any requirement ends the token; neither resemblance nor reconstruction restores it. Strawson supplies the direct process-subject identity precedent, Papineau makes system-level experience available without experiential constituents, and cybernetics supplies resources for possibility, constraint, and continuing organization. IER develops these resources into an explicit physicalist framework without inferring experience from feedback, self-maintenance, or closure alone. Its identity proposal remains abductive. The account allows turnover, changing qualitative organization, and compatible multiscale operations, while rejecting numerical identity by branching or fusion. It avoids experiential constituent inheritance rather than solving combination on panpsychist terms. Operational individuation, worked physical instantiation, empirical attribution, particular qualitative correspondence, and comparison with one-event rivals remain unresolved. The contribution is the framework's formulation, organization, arguments, and implications; no historical first priority or empirical demonstration is claimed.

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.