Meaning, Constraint, and the Emergence of Conscious Experience

Contemporary accounts of consciousness frequently appeal to physical representation, information processing, or emergent neural dynamics, yet continue to face difficulty in explaining why such processes are accompanied by subjective experience. In particular, the unity, perspectival character, and apparent meaningfulness of experience resist explanation in purely representational or dynamical terms. This paper explores the possibility that meaning—understood as an abstract, interpretive organizational structure rather than a physical representation—plays a constitutive role in conscious experience.