The mechanism of phenomenal experience

The essay develops a reconstructive systems theory of consciousness based on the causal self-closure of biological systems. Consciousness is not understood as a property or effect, but as the epistemic form that inevitably arises when the causal structure of a system is completely self-contained.

Physical, biological and phenomenal descriptions are epistemically autonomous forms of reconstruction that are structurally irreducible to each other. There is no translation relation between them, because they represent structurally heterogeneous modes of cognition within a single ontological basis.

In contrast to functionalist theories, which presuppose consciousness by definition, this model reconstructs consciousness genealogically: from thermodynamic self-organization to biological autocatalysis to neuronal oscillation dynamics. The central thesis is that consciousness is not an emergent property of complex systems, but the epistemic form that a physical system necessarily assumes when its causal structure collapses completely into itself.

For philosophers, this work shows why the hard problem is a category error: Physical and phenomenal description are different epistemic ways of reconstructing the same structure, not ontologically separated domains.

For neuroscientists, it combines measurable correlates (oscillation dynamics, perturbational complexity index) with the necessity of subjective experience and explains why global integration implies an internal perspective.