Conscious Mode, Functional Self-Governance, and the Boundary of the Subject: A Cross-Substrate Causal Grammar.

Abstract

This paper develops a cross-substrate causal grammar for distinguishing conscious mode, functional self-governance, and continuity of personality in large systems. “Large” denotes not physical size but a relatively bounded, historically extended organization whose interacting processes can alter its subsequent operation. The framework tracks the fate of a difference through trace, expectation, significance, situation construction, choice, executed action, a partially independent world response, and targeted update. It thereby separates salience from significance, attention from action weight, intention from execution, alarm from task state, memory from personality, and self-model from phenomenal ownership. Similar functional questions may be posed of humans, animals, artificial agents, and hybrid systems without assuming phenomenal or moral equivalence. Cross-substrate comparison is therefore a method of causal analysis, not a claim that physical realization is irrelevant. The framework neither derives phenomenality from function nor declares present-day AI systems conscious. Its contribution is a unified vocabulary for locating a function at the correct system boundary and tracing which component inherits its consequences. This boundary-first principle constrains attributions of memory, agency, and selfhood, while the accompanying discipline of non-equivalences exposes false completion, misdirected updating, and conflated levels of organization. Version 1.2 note. This version revises §6.4 to clarify the distinction between the Axis as a hierarchy of inter-mode priorities and the vector as the reconstructed direction of reorganization. It replaces “pattern” with “historically stabilized organization of transitions,” reframes the former “cage” case as a stable learned constraint, and aligns §6.6 accordingly. It also adds a clarifying comparison with active inference and three supporting references. The central claims and causal grammar remain unchanged.