Consciousness as Aperture: Nonlocal Information, Substrate Constraints, and the Structure of Subjective Experience

This paper presents a unified framework for consciousness built from two lines of reasoning that achieve consilience on a single specification for conscious substrates. The empirical line — drawing on a formal thought experiment (the Discrete Gate Construction), the neuroscience of traumatic dissociation, and cross-species data on self-model complexity — yields a vehicle specification: consciousness requires a physical substrate characterized by temporal continuity, sufficient interior complexity, and a self-model. The physical line — grounded in the informational asymmetry between the total information content of reality and the finite capacity of any local region, as established by the Bekenstein bound — shows that bounded physical apertures are a necessary feature of any reality in which local experience occurs, and that the structural requirements of such apertures correspond to the empirically derived specification. The framework proposes a type-identity between experience and structured partiality through a bounded aperture, suggesting that the hard problem of consciousness may rest on a false premise. Testable predictions are offered, including novel predictions about the neural signatures of volitional versus traumatic dissociation.