Epistemic Horizons: A Computational Theory of Consciousness, Perspective, and Knowability

Computational functionalism leaves open what fixes the character of experience, which process possesses it, how it causes behavior, and how a subject can know it. This paper defends the centered-knowledge thesis: for a phenomenal center, phenomenal character is identical to the complete organization of the distinctions available at that causal locus, their access relations, and the transitions they can govern. Because the same centered states constitute phenomenal differences and produce comparison, memory, judgment, report, and action, the thesis explains epistemic contact with one’s experience, answers the causal demand of the meta-problem, excludes functionally identical zombies, and derives the explanatory gap from the exclusivity of occupation: to occupy one complete state is to occupy no other. Organizational invariance, substrate independence, and multiple realizability follow from the identity rather than entering as separate principles, and the substitution level turns them into a criterion for replacement, emulation, and upload fidelity. Causal access individuates the subject, explains binding, unity, and privacy, and permits nested and overlapping centers. The same boundary that individuates a subject also limits what it can know: present centered knowledge underdetermines history, program, substrate, and world, and physics appears to any observer as structure and dynamics because only these cross a point of view’s boundary. The identity’s natural limit, advanced as a separable hypothesis, is that phenomenality begins with the first causally usable distinction. Comparisons with global-workspace, higher-order, and integrated-information theories yield contrasting attributions, and tests are proposed. Experience is what structured knowledge is like for the process that possesses it.