Statement of the Thesis

Statement of the Thesis

The thesis is an identity claim: phenomenal experience is intrinsic cause-effect structure. Not caused by it, not correlated with it, but identical to it. The phenomenal properties of an experience (what it’s like) just are the structural properties of the system’s internal causal relations, described from the intrinsic perspective.

To make this precise, we need two notions. The cause-effect structure $\cestructure(\mathcal{S}, \state)$ of a system $\mathcal{S}$ in state $\state$ is the complete specification of: (a) all distinctions ${\distinction_i}$—subsets of the system’s elements in their current states; (b) the cause repertoire of each distinction, $p(\text{past} | \distinction_i)$; (c) the effect repertoire, $p(\text{future} | \distinction_i)$; (d) all relations ${\relation_{ij}}$—overlaps and connections between distinctions’ causes and effects; and (e) the irreducibility of each distinction and relation. The intrinsic perspective is the description of this structure without reference to any external observer, coordinate system, or comparison class—the structure as it exists for the system itself.

The phenomenal structure $\phenom$ is identical to the intrinsic cause-effect structure $\cestructure$.

An unexpected confirmation arrives from engineering. Recent neural architectures that use the synchronization pattern across neurons — the pairwise temporal correlation matrix — as their primary representation outperform those that use hidden states directly. The move: instead of treating integration as a side-effect of computation, treat it as the computation's output. Systems designed this way develop emergent gaze (attending to different input regions at different processing steps), adaptive computation depth (thinking longer about harder problems), and richer internal representations — all without being explicitly trained for any of these capacities. Engineering pressure arrived at synchronization-as-representation for performance reasons. The identity thesis arrives at integration-as-experience for phenomenological reasons. The structural commitment is the same: the coupling pattern across components is not a byproduct but the thing itself.

This is not a correlation claim or a supervenience claim. It is an identity claim, analogous to:

But the analogy conceals a difficulty that should be stated directly. The water–H$_2$O identity was established empirically: we could independently characterize water (the stuff in lakes) and H$_2$O (the molecular structure), discover they were the same substance, and verify the identity through converging evidence. No comparable procedure exists for experience and cause-effect structure, because experience is accessible only from the intrinsic perspective while cause-effect structure is measured from the extrinsic perspective. There is no vantage point from which both are simultaneously available for comparison. The identity thesis is therefore a philosophical commitment, not an empirical discovery—one that earns its keep not by being verified directly but by generating structural predictions that can be tested against phenomenal reports. If those predictions consistently track reported experience (Part VII), the thesis gains inductive support. If they don't, the thesis fails. But confirmation is always indirect, always mediated by report, and this asymmetry should be kept in view throughout what follows.