Consciousness is not a cosmic person
I use Consciousness, with a capital C, in a technical sense: the manifest pole of a constitutively bipolar relation. I do not mean a human mind, an observing soul, or a universal psychological subject.
I do not claim that every electron or stone has individual experience. In my proposal, individual consciousness belongs to integrated configurations, rather than being indiscriminately distributed throughout matter.
The argument of the mute monad
I acknowledge that physical differences exist independently of observers. But I ask whether a closed network of such differences, considered as a whole, can constitute determinate reality with no possible register of manifestation. Under the principle of operational determinacy, I argue that a merely self-certifying network remains a mute monad.
I understand the second pole as internal to reality, not a spectator outside the universe. I describe Consciousness as a relational act rather than a substance: it neither creates Being nor temporally precedes it.
A declared unresolved premise
In edition 3.7 I explicitly distinguish my subtractive method from the further principle required for the bipolar thesis. A realist can instead take the determinacy of physical structure as primitive. This is a substantive point of philosophical disagreement.
In Chapter 8, I also suggest exploratory levels of integrated consciousness, from minimal relational apperception to meta-observation. I regard these levels as revisable, not as an exhaustive or universally biological sequence.
Does a network of differences suffice by itself, or does determinate Being require a manifest pole?
Chapter 3 §3.3; Chapter 7; Chapter 8; Appendix A.6.
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