The Physical Infrastructure of Experience

Contemporary theories of consciousness share a common methodological deficit: they describe functional correlates of experience without determining the structural conditions under which experience as such becomes possible at all. The present article develops a framework for the physical infrastructure of experience, the set of necessary structural conditions, not sufficient causal mechanisms, that a physical system must satisfy in order to make phenomenal experience possible. Drawing on the theory of causal collapse and the concept of the causal core as interpreter (Stegemann 2026a, 2025a, 2025b), the article argues that three mutually conditioning structural features constitute this infrastructure: (1) criticality, understood as the dynamic regime of phase transitions in which characteristic length scales diverge; (2) non-factorizability, understood as the ensuing impossibility of decomposing the causal structure of the system into independent partial causes; and (3) the causal core as a dynamic attractor in the system’s phase space, providing the reflexive dimension without which integrated causal unity would remain inert. Mathematically, three independent formal strands converge on the same structural situation: the Hammersley-Clifford theorem, the non-analyticity of the partition function, and the violation of the entanglement entropy area law, the last as a formal characterization tool, not a mechanistic hypothesis about neural quantum processes. An explicit demarcation from Integrated Information Theory shows that non-factorizability in the present framework is a categorical structural property, not a scalar measure. Comparison with superconducting coherence sharpens the anti-panpsychist argument, and concrete proposals for empirically distinguishing active from passive criticality are developed. The framework does not claim to solve the hard problem; it claims to determine the physical preconditions without which the hard problem cannot arise at all.