From Three Axioms to the Hard Problem of Consciousness: A Constructive Response via the Information-Level Unidirectional Constraint English Version

Abstract

Mainstream theories of consciousness largely address what Chalmers calls the easy problems and do not explain, from first principles, why a complete third-person description cannot recover first-person experience. Starting from three axioms (finite resources, non-equilibrium persistence, and discrete input) and arguing by eliminative convergence, this paper forms an Information Capacity Frame and shows that a finite system maintaining itself across time must encode in levels: a higher-level format can only append coordinates to a lower level and cannot be recovered from it without loss, an Information-Level Unidirectional Constraint (ILUC). The hard problem is then split in two. The format gap is closed by this constraint, its width being the dimension difference between encoding levels, a calibratable engineering quantity. The existence question is dissolved by a structural definition: experience is the first-person self-access process itself, meeting four formal conditions of anchoring, access termination, whole-package presentation, and mandatory weight, with no phenomenal entity beyond structure; the stubborn intuition of a phenomenal quality is explained as a predictable introspective misjudgment arising from access termination. The framework thereby answers the explanatory gap, Mary's Room, and the zombie argument together, preserves and re-describes qualia, presupposes no neural substrate.