From Autopoiesis to Enaction
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-09-11
Abstract: This paper reconstructs a conceptual shift from the original theory of autopoiesis to later enactive approaches to cognition and experience. The central claim is that the transition is not a straightforward deduction from autopoiesis. Maturana’s identification of life with cognition expands the concept of cognition from the outset. Later developments add embodied action, autonomy, adaptivity, agency, sense-making, and first-person experience. Each addition addresses a genuine problem, but the sequence risks turning biological regulation into semantic and eventually phenomenal vocabulary without identifying the mechanism that warrants the transition. The paper therefore distinguishes self-production, regulation, cognition, and experience as different explanatory targets. It argues that autopoiesis remains a powerful account of biological individuality if it is not equated with cognition. An alternative continuation is proposed: instead of locating the decisive development primarily in organism–environment coupling, the analysis follows the evolutionary differentiation of the living system itself, especially the emergence of nervous systems, fast signal integration, recursive closure, and a neurally constituted epistemic operational interior. Embodiment and environmental coupling remain necessary conditions, but they are not thereby mechanisms of experience. The result is a reconstruction of the historical divergence between autopoietic theory and later enactivism and a proposal for a biologically grounded route from living organization to cognition and phenomenal experience.
A Thought Experiment on the In-Principle Impossibility of Constructed Consciousness
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-08-19
Abstract: The thought experiment is structured as a cascade. Each station formulates a thesis about what might give rise to experience. The thesis is tested against its strongest argument and rejected where it no longer explains experience adequately. Each failure gives rise to the next thesis. In this way, the question is driven progressively deeper, step by step. The conclusion holds on the condition that the requirements developed along this path are accepted.
A precise question is being examined: Can consciousness be technically constructed, that is, can its constitutive organization be specified sufficiently and then deliberately realized? This must be distinguished from the question of whether technically created initial conditions could enable an open process in which life and, eventually, consciousness arise. This second possibility is not excluded from the outset. It must satisfy the same requirements as any other possible process of emergence.
Why Artificial Life and Consciousness Are Impossible in Principle
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-08-06
Abstract: This essay develops an argument for the principled, not merely practical, impossibility of producing artificial life and artificial consciousness. The impossibility follows from the convergence of several lines of reasoning: from the nature of scientific abstraction, which always yields a map and never the landscape itself; from the size and branching structure of the evolutionary space of possibilities; from the active path-production of living systems, which continually co-produce their own space of possibilities rather than traversing a pre-given one; from the operative closure of biological autocatalysis, which shifts the concept away from the ahistorical, organizational reading of autopoiesis toward a historical-causal path thesis; and from the claim that ontology is the epistemic determination of the ontic, whereby the epistemic and ontological inaccessibility of the path collapse into one. The central aporia: construction presupposes a factorized description, yet what is causally relevant in the living is precisely its non-factorizability. The argument requires no assumption of a phenomenal residue separable from function and takes hold one step earlier, at the logical form of construction itself.
From State to Mode: Criticality and Non-Factorizability as Constitutive Properties of Living Systems
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-06-26
Abstract: In earlier work, the phylogenetic sequence from autocatalytic autopoiesis through the causal core and electrification to defactorization was developed as a reconstructive derivation of the biological conditions of phenomenal consciousness. Non-factorizability appears there as the result of the fourth tipping point, criticality as its physical realization condition. The present article shows that both properties follow the same logic in the scaling sequence: they are present in autopoietic systems from the very beginning and develop qualitatively new forms with the scaling of the nervous system. This shared logic has remained implicit in previous work; making it explicit is the contribution of this article. The decisive difference from non-living dissipative systems lies in the fact that criticality there is a state a system has, whereas in autopoietic systems it is a mode in which the system operates as a living one. In the nervous system, this mode takes the specific form that realizes non-factorizability as a stable operating condition. The conceptual explanatory gain of this precision becomes apparent at two clinical phenomena: epilepsy and coma can no longer be understood as opposite points on an activation axis, but as structurally distinct failures of the same critical mode in opposite directions.
The Biological Foundation of the Soul
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-06-19
Abstract: The soul has an image problem. Anyone who mentions it today in a scientific conversation can expect, at best, an indulgent smile. The concept is considered obsolete, a relic of a pre-scientific era in which whatever could not be explained was given a name, and the name was then mistaken for an explanation.
And yet the question behind the concept never disappeared. What is it that makes an organism a subject? What is that inner point from which a being acts, perceives, and refers to itself? Science has not explained this point. It has circumvented it.
Behaviorism declared inner states scientifically irrelevant: what counts is observable behavior. Cognitivism replaced the soul with information processing: the mind is a system, not a center. Freud operationalized it as the trinity of id, ego, and superego, psychologically precise but biologically unanchored. Modern neuroscience, finally, dissolved the center altogether: what remains are distributed networks, default mode networks, global workspaces, free energy. No place left for a soul.
What all these movements have in common: they declared the inner center, the point of reference, either unscientific or dissolved it into functions, without asking whether something real might still lie behind the concept of the soul, something that merely needed a different description. Behaviorism forbade the question. Cognitivism reformulated it. Neuroscience dissolved it into networks. But forbidden, reformulated, and dissolved is not answered.
David Chalmers captured this situation in a single phrase in 1995: the hard problem of consciousness. Why is there subjective experience at all? Why isn't it dark in there? Chalmers did not pose a new question; he named an old one that science had systematically circumvented. The hard problem is still considered unsolved today. This article proposes that it is not unsolved, but misconceived. The question “why is there experience?” presupposes that experience is something added to a physical system. The causal core shows that this presupposition is false.
Neurally Driven Evolution: Behavior, Niche Construction, and the Acceleration of Variation Structure
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-06-02
Abstract: The nervous system invents no new evolutionary mechanism. It accelerates and complexifies an existing one. The first paper in this series showed that autocatalytic systems generate, through their history of perturbations, a structured variation space whose topology makes certain variations more probable than others. The present paper extends this thesis to the level of neural systems. The nervous system is not a fourth inheritance system in Jablonka's sense, but a possibility-space generator operating on a dramatically shortened timescale, which acts on the perturbation structure of offspring through niche construction, without leaving the causal architecture of the basic mechanism. Three empirically grounded channels connect neural processes to heritable variation structure: activity-dependent gene expression inscribed into the somatic genome of neurons; neuroendocrine axes transmitting chronic neural integration states to the germline; and niche construction as the primary indirect channel through which behavior shapes the perturbation environment of successive generations. The Weismann barrier remains intact throughout. The category error committed by Jablonka's behavioral inheritance system is avoided by maintaining strict causal-level distinctions.
Perturbation, Integration, Possibility Space
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-05-31
Abstract: Neo-Darwinism describes the filter, not the structure of what gets filtered. It does not explain why highly adaptive phenomena occur: coherent, rapid adaptations across multiple traits simultaneously, which random search in the entire possibility space could not achieve. This paper develops an alternative framework. The central thesis is that autocatalytic systems generate, through their history of perturbations, a structured, non-uniformly distributed variation space whose topology makes certain variations more probable than others. When this pre-structured space is congruent with current selective pressure, the result appears highly adaptive. This congruence is neither guaranteed nor random, but itself a product of system history. The thesis is developed at the cell-biological, epigenetic, and evolutionary-biological levels, empirically anchored, and precisely demarcated from Jablonka's four-dimensions model and from neo-Darwinism. Recent findings on epigenetically driven mutational bias, stress-induced transposon mobilization, cryptic genetic variation, and the G-matrix framework provide converging empirical support.
The Causal Core - A centralist principle of causality from the prokaryotic cell to self, ego, and agency
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-04-12
Abstract: This article develops the thesis that living systems form a centralist internal asymmetry from their very first appearance, a structure I refer to as the causal core. This core is not a morphological compartment and not a localisable site. It is a functional attractor that emerges from superposed thermodynamic flows within an operationally closed space, constitutes itself in the prokaryotic cell, and recurs in formally invariant fashion at every higher organisational level of the living. The article draws together the empirical evidence for this continuity from five domains, discusses five possible objections, and finally applies the model to self, ego, and agency. These three terms are not reconstructed as independent cognitive modules but as three descriptive directions of the same causal core at the highest level of biological complexity.
The Placebo Effect as a Phenomenon of Autocatalytic Organization
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-03-14
Abstract: The standard neuroscientific account of the placebo effect identifies the neurochemical systems involved but fails to explain the constitutive transition from semantic context to physiological cascade. The dominant explanatory concept—expectation—does not resolve this gap; it merely relabels the explanandum. This paper proposes an alternative framework based on the theory of autocatalytic organization, drawing on the formal work of Rosen, Kauffman, and Montévil/Mossio. In an autocatalytically organized system, there is no translation between “meaning” and “physiology” because both are aspects of the same self-maintaining process. The placebo effect is reconceived as the integration of a perturbation into self-reinforcing cascades, governed by the topology of the autocatalytic network. This framework is applied to four empirical domains: psychoneuroimmunology (conditioned immunosuppression), open-label placebos, network neuroscience, and the placebome. Concrete, testable hypotheses are derived, including the prediction that perturbation-based measures of network non-factorizability should correlate with placebo magnitude. The clinical implications include a reframing of the drug–placebo distinction, a critique of the factorizability assumption underlying RCT design, and a rationale for individualized open-label placebo interventions.
Experience as Self-Reference
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-02-27
Abstract: The present article advances a physical identity principle for consciousness: experience is not produced by, correlated with, or supervenient upon a specific class of physical states, it is identical with them. More precisely, experience is identical with endogenously generated, self-sustaining self-reference of the kind that autocatalytic systems necessarily instantiate when the infrastructure conditions identified in Stegemann (2026) are satisfied. This identity is not a contingent empirical finding but a conceptual one: the term ‘experience’ means nothing other than a physical state of the relevant structural type, described from the perspective of the system that is in it. The hard problem of consciousness, why physical processes give rise to subjective experience, is not solved by this principle but eliminated: the question rests on a false presupposition, namely that experience is something over and above the physical state. Once the presupposition is removed, no explanatory gap remains. The identity principle is stated in compact form as ℰ ≡ Πₐₙ, where ℰ denotes experience and Πₐₙ denotes the self-reference mapping of an autocatalytically organized system. The article distinguishes this structural identity thesis from classical type-identity theories, defends it against the multiple realizability objection and the knowledge argument, and draws out its consequences for the scientific study of consciousness.
The Physical Infrastructure of Experience
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-02-27
Abstract: 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.
The Causal Core as Interpreter
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-01-22
Abstract: Contemporary cognitive science operates predominantly with a representational paradigm that implies a linear causal structure: stimuli become neuronal patterns, these patterns "represent" world states, and subsequent processing stages operate on these representations. This conception misses the actual functioning of conscious systems. The present article develops an alternative conception: The causal nucleus (CC) interprets incoming neuronal patterns instead of processing them. This interpretation is done by non-linear interference between input patterns and the coherent system state of the KK. Mathematical formalization as phase-amplitude coupling shows that meaning does not lie in the patterns themselves, but arises from their non-factorizable interaction with the interpreting system state. This conception has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of perception, cognition and consciousness.
A Framework for Consciousness: Autopoiesis, Causal Poiesis, Causal Collapse
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-01-21
Abstract: Where does consciousness come from? Despite numerous theories – from neuronal correlates to information processing to quantum physical hypotheses – this question remains unanswered if it is considered only within narrow disciplinary boundaries. This essay proposes an alternative approach: consciousness is not understood here as an emergent phenomenon or product of neuronal activity, but as the result of a multi-stage, systemic-thermodynamic process. The key concepts are: autopoiesis, causal poiesis and causal collapse. They mark three fundamental stages on which living systems emerge, center, and finally, under certain conditions, develop consciousness.
The aim of this essay is to systematically reconstruct this path from life to consciousness on the basis of the concepts mentioned above – not in the sense of a goal-oriented development, but as a consequence of certain structural and exchange relations in open systems.
This approach deliberately differs from established information-theoretical models such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT) or Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT). While these try to explain consciousness through functional information integration, the approach proposed here is based on structural-thermodynamic processes as they occur in the self-organization of living systems. Terms such as "causal core" or "causal collapse" are conceptual proposals that are based on concretely describable systemic properties – even if they have so far only been formalized and operationalized in initial theoretical work (cf. Stegemann, 2025a, 2025b). The present text is therefore not intended as a complete theory, but as a theoretical framework for the development of an interdisciplinary model of understanding.
The mechanism of phenomenal experience
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-01-15
Abstract: The essay develops a reconstructive systems theory of consciousness based on the causal self-closure of biological systems. Consciousness is not understood as a property or effect, but as the epistemic form that inevitably arises when the causal structure of a system is completely self-contained.
Physical, biological and phenomenal descriptions are epistemically autonomous forms of reconstruction that are structurally irreducible to each other. There is no translation relation between them, because they represent structurally heterogeneous modes of cognition within a single ontological basis.
In contrast to functionalist theories, which presuppose consciousness by definition, this model reconstructs consciousness genealogically: from thermodynamic self-organization to biological autocatalysis to neuronal oscillation dynamics. The central thesis is that consciousness is not an emergent property of complex systems, but the epistemic form that a physical system necessarily assumes when its causal structure collapses completely into itself.
For philosophers, this work shows why the hard problem is a category error: Physical and phenomenal description are different epistemic ways of reconstructing the same structure, not ontologically separated domains.
For neuroscientists, it combines measurable correlates (oscillation dynamics, perturbational complexity index) with the necessity of subjective experience and explains why global integration implies an internal perspective.
Methodology of Consciousness Theory
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2026-01-02
Abstract: Consciousness research suffers from a methodological and categorical double deficit. While the natural sciences explicitly discuss and justify their methods, consciousness research lacks systematic methodological reflection. This methodological deficit is functionally related to a basic categorical error: the confusion of epistemic levels of description with ontological entities. This level confusion results in three pseudo-problems, which are treated as central research questions, namely the body-soul problem, the hard problem and the what-is-it-like problem.
The present article develops a reconstructionist method as a solution to this double deficit. This method avoids the categorical confusion between levels of description and ontology and identifies functional necessities instead of arbitrary correlations. Central is the insight that consciousness does not emerge from dead matter, but from autocatalytic organization. The model of causal collapse describes consciousness as a state of maximally non-factorizable causal entanglement in neuronal systems that arises when a measure of causal separability Σ(t) falls below a critical threshold Σc.
The thesis systematically reconstructs the necessary conditions for consciousness: autocatalytic organization as a biological foundation, the causal nucleus as an evolutionary structural principle from the cell nucleus to the default mode network, electrical signal transduction in the nervous system, and finally causal collapse as a mechanism of phenomenal experience. Phylogenetic development shows how the causal nucleus as a structural principle permeates evolution from prokaryotes to early nervous systems to human consciousness.
Different forms of consciousness are derived from specific collapse structures: primary consciousness as sensorimotor collapse, self-consciousness as recursive collapse with self-model, intentionality as prospective collapse, and affective consciousness as limbically integrated collapse. The theoretical positioning shows that the model integrates and specifies Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory and plasticity approaches.
Empirically, the model is supported by the Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI), functional connectivity patterns, and characteristic differences between states of consciousness. For predictions that are not directly proven, concrete test procedures are proposed. The method transforms arbitrary correlations into functional necessities and opens up new avenues for empirical research, artificial systems of consciousness and clinical applications.
Cognitive Surplus Capacity as the Foundation of Cultural Construction
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-12-20
Abstract: This article develops the thesis that the major cultural constructions of humanity (religion, esotericism, art, science) result from a structural discrepancy between cognitive processing capacity and available sensory inputs. While cognitive systems with low neural complexity can operate largely reactively to sensory data, significant surplus capacity necessitates constructive processing beyond the given. These constructions differ not in their cognitive source, but in their methodological constraints: religion dogmatizes its constructions, art makes them explicit as such, science organizes them under conditions of falsifiability. The thesis is developed as a heuristic principle that makes disparate cultural phenomena comprehensible under a unified perspective and is categorially specified to avoid confusions between structural, functional, and phenomenal levels of description.
Consciousness as a collapse of causality
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-11-09
Abstract: Why do we feel something? Why is there not only motion, reaction and calculation in a part of the universe, but also experience, qualia, self-awareness? Classical physics knows only cause and effect, computer science only knows input and output. But in consciousness, both seem to blur. This essay is based on the thesis: Consciousness arises where a recursive causal system loses the distinction between cause and effect of its own states. Based on concepts such as autocatalysis, information density, feedback and self-reference, we develop an interdisciplinary model of sensing – between physics, philosophy and artificial intelligence.
Consciousness as an Expression of Autocatalytic Stability – A New Index for Neuronal Coherence
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-11-05
Abstract: The present model assumes that consciousness is not an additive effect of cognitive complexity, but a specific form of systemic integration: a “causal collapse” within the space of recursive processes. This term does not mean destruction, but a temporary indistinguishability of causal paths – a state in which stimulus processing, memory retrieval, and self-modeling can no longer be separated. This collapse is not purely functional, but a structural-energetic phenomenon: It only arises when a system maintains its autocatalytic stability, i.e., when feedback processes are recursively stabilized within a critical range. Such stabilization can only occur in living systems – those that not only consume energy but also regulate it cyclically.
From the Transcendental Subject to the Causal Core
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-10-15
Abstract: The relationship between subject and object has been the crystallization point of consciousness research since transcendental philosophy. From Kant to Husserl, attempts were made to understand the conditions of the possibility of knowledge from the structure of the subject. However, with the transition to empirical neuroscience, this question has not disappeared, but has merely been transformed. The transcendental framework continues to have an effect – as an implicit prerequisite of many theories that see themselves as naturalistic.
The present text pursues the goal of making this implicit framework visible and overcoming it. He traces the historical development from transcendental philosophy to today's neuro- and systems-theoretical models of consciousness, in order to finally propose an alternative concept: that of causal collapse and the causal core. These terms do not describe consciousness as an emergent product, but as a structural consequence of the self-binding of causal processes. In this way, the classic pair of opposites of spirit and nature is abolished without falling into reductionism.
Models and the test of consciousness
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-10-06
Abstract: For decades, new theories have been emerging that want to explain what consciousness is. They speak of information integration (Tononi, 2004, 2015), of global availability (Baars, 1988; Dehaene, 2014), recursive predictions (Friston, 2010) or phenomenological structures (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). Their common conviction is that consciousness can be explained by certain dynamics and forms of organization. But the crucial question remains: How could we tell that such a model not only sounds conclusive, but actually produces consciousness?
In the following, it will be shown that all current models of consciousness are subject to a fundamental test. Four aspects must be considered: (1) its generative power, which has not yet been proven, (2) its metaphysical positions, (3) its circular validation between theory and empiricism, and (4) its predominantly interpretive, non-explanatory function.
Category errors as a structural principle of philosophy
Author: Stegemann, Woilfgang |
Date: 2025-09-10
Abstract: This paper identifies and analyzes systematic category mistakes that pervade classical and contemporary philosophical debates from antiquity to the present, structuring discussions in ontology, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Six fundamental types of category errors are distinguished: ambiguity of central concepts; conflation of descriptive levels; substantive reification of processes; confusion of syntax with semantics; ungrounded metaphysical assumptions; and ontologization of normative values. Through classical and modern examples, it shows how unmarked shifts between logical levels generate theoretical confusion, misleading metaphysical claims, and conceptual puzzles. The diagnosis reveals that many current scientific and philosophical theories revive old category errors in new forms under the guise of exact sciences, particularly in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience. The paper argues for establishing "category hygiene" as a methodological principle that clarifies conceptual distinctions, avoids illegitimate ontological claims, and grounds philosophy more firmly in critical reflection and empirical engagement. This approach aims to revitalize philosophy's critical role by dispelling persistent confusions rather than generating novel metaphysical systems.
The Causal Core as a Structural Principle of Free Will
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-09-04
Abstract: The debate on free will remains shaped by metaphysical speculation, reductionist simplifications, and categorical misunderstandings. While classical philosophy often conceived it as a gift of divine grace or the expression of rational autonomy, modern neuroscience and cognitive models tend to deny freedom in favor of deterministic or probabilistic causal chains. This article advances the thesis that the capacity for intentional action is not rooted in an immaterial will, but in a structural center that emerged in the course of biological evolution: the causal core. This core is not a substance but a dynamically integrating system function, thermodynamically initiated, biologically centered, and psychologically accessible. Drawing on thermodynamic principles, the theory of autopoiesis, and system theory, the article traces the causal core’s genesis from autocatalytic chemical cycles and the encapsulation of protocells, through the emergence of the eukaryotic cell nucleus as a morphologically identifiable locus, to its complex integration in neural systems. The causal core stabilizes selective coupling and enables intentional, goal-oriented behavior. By distinguishing biological and psychological levels of description and avoiding the category error of causal reductionism, the article proposes a consistent systems-theoretical model that unites empirical findings with a coherent epistemological framework. The implications for the concept of free will are discussed, along with applications to artificial systems and animal cognition.
Valence as a universal principle of binding and weighting
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-09-04
Abstract: This work develops a unified theory of valence as a scale-spanning organizational principle from quantum chemistry to political ideology. Valence is defined as preferential stabilization - a mechanism that begins with energetic preferences in chemical bonds and continues through biochemical affinities and neuromodulatory signaling to cognitive evaluation processes. The central thesis states that ideological beliefs emerge and are stabilized through the same valence-based weighting mechanisms that modulate synaptic plasticity. This perspective explains the persistence and rigidity of political worldviews as natural consequences of neurochemical reinforcement systems, not as cognitive defects. The theory generates testable predictions for pharmacological, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging studies and has implications for therapeutic interventions in ideological rigidity as well as for the design of democratic institutions. In contrast to rationalistic approaches, valence theory emphasizes the fundamental role of emotional evaluation in all human cognition, offering a naturalistic alternative to normative ideals of rational discourse.
Physics of Organismic Storage
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-07-21
Abstract: Current neuroscientific models of memory usually view memory as a function, for example as a reactivation of earlier activation patterns, as a symbolic encoding, or as the recognition of stored content. In this perspective, memory is primarily understood as a functional change in state or as the re-availability of semantic or sensory information that is stabilized by synaptic plasticity or molecular modulation. What is usually missing is a physically sound description of what "storage" actually means. In the position represented here, therefore, a radical change of perspective is undertaken: memory is not the reappearance of a stored symbol, but the material, directed restructuring of the system itself. In this sense, memory is not a passive archive, but the active expression of a structural transformation. Storing means that a system has changed irreversibly – and this change is not metaphorical, but physically real.
Consciousness: An Integrative Model of the Four Fundamental Principles
Author: Stegemann, Wolfgang |
Date: 2025-06-20
Abstract: Consciousness is defined as the emergent state of a system that fulfills four fundamental principles: (1) autocatalysis as the energetic basis of self-sustaining processes, (2) a causal core as a thermodynamically determined integration center, (3) causal collapse as the fusion of separate causal pathways into an irreducible entity, and (4) plasticity as structural adaptability. The model differs from existing theories in its process-ontological approach: consciousness does not arise through information processing or representation, but through the physical fusion of causal processes. This theory makes specific, empirically testable predictions about neuronal correlates of consciousness and offers new explanatory approaches for pathological states of consciousness, animal consciousness and the limits of artificial intelligence.