Three Floors: What a Consciousness Meter Reads When Nothing Is There, and What That Implies for REG Work

One-page summary prepared for the ICRL Research Roundtable, 1 November 2026. We built a real-time instrument that reports one index from consumer EEG and HRV, Psi = Phi x (dI/dS) x (E/S): integration, order, and coherence of effort. Before trusting any number it produced, we ran each factor on input that contained nothing. All three had a floor, a value the instrument returns on noise, which it had been reporting as signal. Sixty-five percent of the integration value we had been reporting was accounted for by a surrogate with the signal destroyed. The fix was not a better estimator but a null matched to what each statistic can see. The same problem runs through random-event-generator research: XOR masking, Von Neumann and Toeplitz extraction, and current entropy-source certification all erase or exceed effects of order 10^-4. We propose three cheap practices: record the raw stream at every stage, match the null to the statistic, and publish the floor every index returns on structureless input.