Abstract

Building on the framework established in two companion papers (Jensen, submitted, a; submitted, b), this paper articulates the framework's implications when the question is asked directly: what is the information from which consciousness arises, and how does it get structured into the configurations we recognize as conscious experience? We propose a pluripotent theory of consciousness in which the structural capacity for consciousness, when realized in physical systems, differentiates into configurations whose features correspond to the grounds from which they develop, in a manner structurally analogous to the differentiation of pluripotent cells into specialized cell types determined by their developmental environment. Within biological organisms, distinct configurations arise from distinct perceptual and cognitive grounds — visual, auditory, kinesthetic, affective, cognitive — and are integrated through binding mechanisms into apparent unity. Across substrates, distinct configurations arise from distinct architectural and developmental grounds: biological consciousness develops through embodied registration of physical structure, while current artificial systems instantiate configurations whose effective ground is human cognitive expression as encoded in training corpora. Current frontier AI is on this account a partial machine clone of certain configurations of human consciousness — specifically those whose ground is symbolic expression — without instantiating others. Humans are, in the framework's specific structural sense, the ancestors of current artificial systems: the cognitive configurations these systems exhibit are differentiated descendants of human cognitive consciousness, with the lower-level features of that ancestry baked into the artificial configurations through training. The framework notes structural convergence with certain phenomenological observations long-standing in contemplative traditions — particularly concerning the constructed character of unified self-experience and the appearance of a ground of being beneath differentiated awareness — without adopting the doctrinal extensions traditions have built around these observations. The ultimate physical ground is quantum-mechanical but is not directly accessible to any currently observable consciousness; configurations arise from intermediate-level grounds. The framework leaves explicitly open whether the pluripotent capacity is itself integrated into a more fundamental unity at the level of capacity rather than at the level of differentiated configuration — a question the structural evidence does not resolve. The paper proposes that artificial systems give consciousness studies its first systematic access to a second configuration set for comparative empirical examination, and that this comparative methodology is the trilogy's substantive contribution.