Presence and Actuality

Experience without determinate content

In Redness Is an Experience, we resisted treating phenomenal redness as a qualitative ingredient that could be detached from experiencing and remain the very same redness. Its phenomenal character belongs to how the activity occurs. Unconscious representations of red and physical continuities between conscious and unconscious processing do not establish that a free-standing phenomenal quality survives the removal of whatever constitutes experiencing.

There is a mirror image of that mistake. Begin with phenomenal presence, remove determinate content, self-representation, and the distinction between subject and object, and announce that what remains is existence itself. Those removals may describe possible experience. The equivocation arises when phenomenal presence supplies the initial intuitive warrant, while bare existence supplies the conclusion. Confidence that there is experience survives a change in what we are claiming to explain.

The question is whether an experiential mode can persist when no determinate content is successfully presented. The terms presence and presentation should leave that question open. They need not imply a separate spectator, a judgment, or a successfully identified object.

Our working proposal concerns content-sensitive regulation: organized activity that maintains, revises, and coordinates the states and processes through which a mind represents. Content-sensitive means that the activity responds to differences relevant to their representational roles in the system. The system need not recognize its own activity as representation, describe its experience, or sustain a coherent account of the world. We have called the relevant mode acquaintance and, in a more specific proposal, saturation. These remain hypotheses about constitution, with substantial work still needed to specify them.

On such an account, the experiential occurrence is not identical to the determinate content successfully presented. The organization might continue to operate while its content-presenting activity becomes unstable or fails. Dreams and psychedelic disorientation put pressure on any account modeled too closely on lucid, rational perception. Failure to make sense of an experience, however, does not establish the absence of the processes through which sense can be made.

Minimal meditative experience raises a different possibility. Perhaps an organized experiential mode can be sustained with little determinate content to regulate, or with a radically altered balance among its activities. Such a state need not be a malfunction. Nor need its constitutive organization be phenomenally articulated for it to remain operative.

These suggestions explain nothing if they make our theory compatible with every outcome. If the proposed regulatory organization can be removed while experience persists, its claim to be constitutive fails. If a minimal state retains but does not engage capacities that the theory previously required to be actively exercised, the theory needs revision. We should distinguish successful content presentation, continuing organized activity, and merely retained capacity. Otherwise regulation becomes another name for whatever must somehow be left whenever experience is reported.

Metzinger’s earlier model treats minimal phenomenal experience in terms of a predictive representation of tonic alertness—the sustained readiness to respond. This representational proposal differs from our suggestion that an experiential mode might persist without successfully presenting determinate content. It demonstrates why a report of emptiness need not terminate inquiry into cognitive constitution. Metzinger 2020, Minimal Phenomenal Experience.

His later book also warns against treating the felt certainty of an experience as knowledge of its metaphysical interpretation. An episode’s apparent revelation does not establish consciousness as ultimate reality. The same restraint should apply to the impression that nothing cognitive remains. Metzinger 2024, chapter 31, pp. 416–417.

IIT and intrinsic existence

Integrated information theory makes the connection between experience and existence explicit. In Integrated Information Theory: A Consciousness-First Approach to What Exists, Giulio Tononi and Melanie Boly write: “Consciousness can thus be considered as intrinsic, absolute, or genuine existence.” Their proposal identifies experience with a system’s intrinsic cause–effect structure; causal irreducibility and maximality help determine which whole exists intrinsically. IIT thus gives the identity claim a formal account whose explanatory merits can be examined. Tononi and Boly 2025, preprint, pp. 2–3.

I welcome the attempt to explain individuation through causal organization. I do not accept the exclusion of overlapping organizations in favor of a maximally qualifying whole. IIT’s account of intrinsic existence supplies specific causal conditions that can be examined. Establishing an organization with those conditions and establishing its phenomenal character are distinguishable explanatory achievements. The question is what warrants their identification, including for very simple organizations.

The proposed identity must preserve the phenomenon it was introduced to explain. If an explanation of intrinsic existence also explains phenomenal presence, we need to see how. Our own proposed identity between experience and a regulatory mode faces the same obligation. The task is to establish the identity, without demanding a further ingredient once it has been established.

There is empirical work on which that disagreement can bear. Boly and colleagues’ Neural Correlates of Pure Presence reports EEG recordings from twenty-two experienced meditators. Reported pure presence was associated with reduced broadband power, especially gamma, relative to mind-wandering, together with low delta power relative to dreamless sleep. The authors interpret the findings through IIT’s prediction that vivid consciousness can accompany a largely quiescent cortical substrate. This is a preprint, and reduced EEG power does not establish an absence of neural activity or of cognitive organization. It nevertheless challenges any theory that expects experiential vividness to track the amount of ongoing processing in a simple way. Boly et al., revised 2025.

For us, the relevant question is what organization remains, what it is doing, and whether the proposed experiential mode survives the change. Silence in a channel can have a role within an organized process, but that role needs to be identified. IIT and our account can be compared through their different commitments about which relations and activities must remain.

Mindedness and integration

Michał’s demand is more modest than IIT’s positive ontology. He presents constraints on an explanation and declines to insist on metaphysical independence between phenomenality and cognition. Before considering what he asks of actuality, we should examine what those constraints require of an account of mindedness. Wójcik, Whether My Seven-Week Six-Volume Inquiry Can Fit Within One Mind, remarks preceding Summalecton 45.

That caution is visible in his appeals to unusual experience. In one exchange about minimal consciousness he answers “Just existence,” then immediately tells his interlocutor: “Don’t extract too much.” Elsewhere in that dialogue he entertains cognitive constituents of experience. His vocabulary is exploratory. Wójcik, Hard Problem of Consciousness Demystified.

His challenge from dreams and pathological experience bears directly on our proposal: an account of successful waking cognition may leave out much of what an account of experience must explain. The examples can expose an account’s narrowness without establishing that cognitive organization is not constitutive at all. Experience need not reveal its representational organization to be constituted through it. Wójcik, Whether Consciousness Can Be Reduced to Computation Without Recourse to Physics.

Michał himself makes a distinction that brings us closer. In Volume 5 of his coarse-graining inquiry, he separates cognition constituting phenomenal actuality from subsequent cognition that uses its output. That leaves a precise disagreement available: which organization constitutes experience, and how does it relate to the organization that remembers, interprets, and acts? Wójcik, Whether Cognitive Science Studies Phenomenal Actuality, his intervention introducing Summalecton 176.

Here mindedness becomes important, and the direction of the challenge partly reverses. Michał can grant understanding to an extended system while asking why a local phenomenal occurrence should itself be meaningful. His version of the Chinese Room grants, for the argument, that the room may understand while the man inside does not. He then asks us to imagine ninety-nine successive cognitive and phenomenal moments verifying a proof through shared memory. Why should any moment amount to more than local processing under an inherited criterion? Wójcik, The Anticomputationalist Nightmare, exchanges introducing Summalectons 186 and 190.

I do not accept that understanding is unproblematic while only phenomenality requires real unity. Our use of organization includes causal integration. Functional organization alone is insufficient even for mindedness on our account: the representational vehicles must participate in an integrated cognitive economy through their actual causal relations. This requirement is already part of our account of mental states, before asking which mental activity is phenomenal. Phenomenal Consciousness as Mode of Being: After Functionalism, Before Meat, sections 1 and 6; What Is a Mental State?, section 6.

Understanding a proof involves an organization in which remembered premises, inferential expectations, error correction, and possible uses of the result constrain one another. The claim that this organization understands should be warranted by what its parts actually do together, including how the activity would change under relevant perturbations. A successful transcript alone does not establish that organization.

This requirement applies equally to emotions. Fear, for example, is not merely a label attached to a collection of avoidance outputs. Its place in a mind concerns relations among appraisal, expectation, memory, bodily regulation, and possible action. These relations can be confused or conflicting. Integration does not mean harmony, rational success, or complete mutual accessibility. It means that the organization’s parts participate in a common mental economy in ways that help constitute their roles.

Nor does integration require everything to occur at once. In the proof example, shared memory could be an active part of an integrated understanding: earlier commitments constrain later judgments, later discoveries revise earlier interpretations, and the result reorganizes further reasoning. Or the arrangement might preserve only a succession of locally adequate operations. The description ninety-nine moments with memory does not decide between them. We must investigate the actual relations, rather than infer either understanding or its absence from the size of the temporal slice.

This suggests an answer to the worry about meaningful experience. If an experiential occurrence is constituted through relations within a mind, its character can depend on relations that extend beyond an isolated moment or component. The wider understanding need not be wholly experienced for the current experience to be shaped by it. Our account must explain how that participation constitutes the particular experience.

The position therefore has two substantial commitments. Some organizations are minded: understanding and emotion genuinely belong to them. Some activity occurs in an experiential mode. We hypothesize that phenomenal activity is a subset of mental activity. Distributed, temporally extended, and overlapping organizations remain possible candidates if their constitutive relations can be demonstrated.

What does Michał mean by actuality?

Michał borrows esse from Thomas Aquinas. Standard accounts distinguish a thing’s essence, what it is, from its act of being, that by which it exists. In finite substances these are really distinct; each has its own limited act of being. Participation in being does not make their acts of existence numerically identical. This is a metaphysical account of existence, encompassing both material and immaterial beings. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Aquinas: Metaphysics, sections 2–4.

Michał’s borrowing does not commit him to Aquinas’s complete account. His own description is methodological: “I have accumulated formidable constraints on a theory of esse.” Physics names a missing science of actuality, without committing him to a particular physical theory. He is searching for an account of being on which phenomenal existence places constraints. Reading him merely as proposing a test for consciousness would narrow his inquiry prematurely. Wójcik, Within One Mind, interventions introducing Summalectons 5 and 45.

His March discussions help explain the direction of that search. He contrasts analog computation, whose physical parts correspond to elements of the computational structure, with compiled digital computation. He seeks a form of existence beyond cybernetic unity, invoking the distinction between substantial and aggregate unity. Wójcik, Whether Consciousness Can Be Reduced to Computation Without Recourse to Physics, interventions introducing Summalectons 6 and 14. Yet he also acknowledges chatbots and companies as real and causally consequential, while seeking vocabulary for different kinds of realness. Wójcik, Hard Problem of Consciousness Demystified. His demand that computation be “physically legible to mindless nature herself” asks how an organization belongs to physical reality independently of our interpreting it. Wójcik, Whether Scientific Literature Ignores the Essence vs. Esse Distinction in Consciousness Debates, intervention introducing Summalecton 2.

His chatbot interlocutor, Thomas Epistemes, makes the unresolved step explicit in Within One Mind. Its reconstruction distinguishes descriptive coarse-graining, operational individuation, and individuation as a being possessing esse. The middle step already identifies an objectively operative organization whose relations matter to physical interactions. What remains unsettled in this reconstruction is whether it constitutes a substantial individual. Michał responds: “Now you get the picture.” Later, Thomas includes the relation between higher-level events and underlying physics among the constraints a theory must address. Within One Mind, Summalectons 34–35, Michał’s following intervention, and Summalecton 45.

For Michał, on this reading, organizational unity does not yet answer the question of actuality. In the case of a mind, an account of how memory, inference, regulation, and action work together may explain its cognitive organization while leaving open what makes it one physically existing individual. His demand for esse asks what would establish that individuality in nature itself.

Organization and individuality

Here our difficulty begins. A being without esse does not exist. On our account, correctly identifying a pattern in reality already establishes its existence. Describing a hypothetical organization, however causally integrated, does not establish that its causal relations occur. But once the organization is correctly identified, we cannot grant that it exists and then ask whether it additionally possesses existence. Questions remain about how it exists, what relations constitute it, and whether it is minded or experiential. Those questions need their own articulation.

Explaining how a higher-level organization is constituted through underlying processes is a substantial task. We must show which relations persist, which differences matter, and what warrants the proposed boundaries. My difficulty concerns the further passage from an organization established in this way to an individual possessing esse. Whatever causal integration constitutes a person already belongs to the organizational account. The middle step need not stop at a loose aggregate while reserving a person’s constitutive unity for the final step.

Ned Block’s Chinese nation thought experiment makes the temptation vivid. People communicating by radio jointly realize a person’s functional organization, prompting doubt about whether the resulting system has experience. Block, Troubles with Functionalism (1978), excerpt. Now let organization evoke the distributed nation and individual evoke the familiar person. Their contrasting connotations can supply an apparent gap between organization and individuality. But the example has silently changed along with the vocabulary.

Hold the example fixed. Compare the organization of the nation with that nation considered as an individual; compare the organization of the person with that person considered as an individual. In either case, what does the latter description add once the constitutive organization has been established? Any relevant difference between the person and the Chinese system must be examined within their respective accounts of organization and realization. We already reject the sufficiency of functional organization for mindedness. Whether Block’s system preserves the relevant causal integration must therefore be examined; the stipulated functional equivalence does not settle that question. But a missing causal relation would be a missing part of the constitutive organization. It would not establish a further passage from a fully constituted organization to its possession of esse.

The point concerns a shift in intuitive examples, even when the explicit definitions stay unchanged. We can borrow the nation’s apparent disunity to make organization seem insufficient, then borrow the person’s apparent unity to make individuality seem like an additional achievement. Correcting that shift does not decide which organizations are minded or experiential. It removes an apparent reason to think that the organization of an individual leaves its individuality unaccounted for.

If a further physical condition is proposed, we can ask what it is and what it explains. If every constitutive condition is already included, the remaining distinction concerns a further metaphysical fact whose content still needs to be supplied. Michał’s constraints may expose a missing condition; withholding the title individual does not itself identify one.

Existence and construction

What would count as establishing these claims? Suppose we have established that an organization exists, explained its mental activity, and offered a well-supported account of its experiential mode. Someone might still ask whether there are other esses: other metaphysical obtainings beyond anything our account can explain. This is my shorthand for a possible objection, not Michał’s formulation.

Our measurements can miss important differences; behavior and recollection can fail to reveal experience; a coarse-graining can discard precisely what matters. A rival account may identify a real distinction that our preferred vocabulary suppresses.

But a proposed distinction needs some route to determination: an account of what would make it obtain, distinguish its instances, or establish its possibility. The route might involve empirical evidence, an explanatory theory, or a constructive proof, including for things we cannot directly observe. Explanatory inaccessibility becomes a problem when every route is disallowed in advance and the bare postulate is nevertheless treated as a fact that other accounts must accommodate.

Naming a further obtaining does not establish a further explanandum, just as calling our preferred process experience does not establish our proposed identity. Both claims need to be specific enough to be challenged. The same standard applies to mindedness: we cannot reserve “genuine understanding” for an inaccessible remainder after every specified organizational requirement has been met.

Applying that standard to our ontology brings me to the concession announced at the beginning. In Indexical Unity, I made perspective do too much. I sometimes pictured our quantum branch as undoubtedly actual, with the actuality of other branches in question. That mixes our warrant for believing something exists with a proposed difference in its status once it exists. An indexical account can locate us within a plurality; it does not establish the existence of its members or address Michał’s inquiry into being.

I withdraw the account of indexical actuality without proposing another account of actuality as a separate ontological status. The questions concern what exists, how it is organized, and what measure it has. We must delineate organizations to investigate them and determine what a measure ranges over. That work need not confer an additional qualification as actualities upon the organizations it identifies.

This is part of a substantial change from my 2025 position. I then located experiential identity in an abstract algorithmic organization across its realizations. Our 2026 writing increasingly locates it in concrete organized occurrences, as developed in Can Two Minds Share One Experience? and the companion upcoming essay Experience, Selfhood and the Organization of a Mind. The indexical account already reflected that change, but carried the additional claim that perspective constitutes actuality. It is that claim I am giving up.

The direction I now want to pursue is finitude and constructibility: an infinite reality containing finite concrete occurrences. The scope and precise meaning of this proposal must be worked out from the Ruliad framework. Wolfram introduces the Ruliad as the entangled limit of computational possibility, with finite observers participating in it; his recent metaphysical discussion emphasizes computational processes and their relations. Wolfram 2021, The Concept of the Ruliad; Wolfram 2026, What Ultimately Is There?.

But I find the word computational misleading here. Computation as we have discussed it with Michał involves a relation between a computer and a content: an organization whose states and transitions realize what is being computed. In the Ruliad framework, physics itself is already a coarse-graining: bounded observers embedded in the Ruliad aggregate distinctions and encounter the regularities described by physical laws. A physical computer and the organization through which it computes must be located within that account. The physical redescription suppresses distinctions in the hypergraph once they have done their explanatory work. Coarse-graining is constitutive of the physical articulation: what counts as a physical object, state, or relation emerges through it. Wolfram 2021, “Experiencing the Ruliad”.

Several distinctions will matter. A finite description can specify an infinite process. A finite occurrence can depend on an environment vastly larger than itself. The extent of an event’s constitutive organization is not automatically the extent of its causal ancestry. We therefore need to say what is finite, what construction establishes, and how an occurrence is individuated within the larger structure. This remains a proposed direction of explanation. It also leaves the problem of reality measure—how occurrences should be counted or weighted—unresolved.

A proof that a constructible model of an organization is possible would, on my intended criterion, establish that the organization is real. What matters is that the construction preserves the relations claimed to constitute it, including the relevant embedding. A list of outputs, or an interpretation imposed on an unrelated sequence, does not automatically establish its dynamics and counterfactual relations.

This is why I regard the view as anti-Platonist, despite its mathematical formulation. Arbitrary abstractions do not acquire autonomous reality just because we can specify them or map them onto something else. The difference is between postulating an organization and establishing its constructive possibility. Once the latter is established, no further act or privileged substance is needed to bestow existence on it.

Establishing an organization’s reality also differs from establishing that a particular system instantiates it. A constructive existence proof for a mind would not show that an arbitrarily interpreted rock is that mind. The latter claim must establish the constitutive relations in that particular embedding. These requirements still permit a great deal of reality beyond our observable world; they restrict what warrants an ontological commitment without promising that reality is small.

Checking a constructive proof might itself require executing a program with its interface reproduced. The verification could then realize the organization whose possibility is being established. Our account must track that occurrence and its constitutive relations.

Levin’s Platonic space

Michael Levin’s appeal to a Platonic space gives this disagreement a concrete setting. In work with Taining Zhang and Adam Goldstein, he investigates arrays whose elements sort themselves using local policies. When different policies are mixed in one array, elements following the same policy tend to cluster temporarily, although clustering by policy was not an explicit sorting objective. Zhang, Goldstein, and Levin 2024, Classical Sorting Algorithms as a Model of Morphogenesis. In his discussion, Levin interprets this tendency as an intrinsic goal alongside the sorting goal supplied by the designers. Levin 2023, What Do Algorithms Want?.

Rules operating together under specified conditions can produce regularities their designer neither intended nor anticipated. The construction has already supplied a way for the clustering to occur. Whether the tendency constitutes a preference requires an account of its role in the system’s organization; its absence from the designer’s intentions does not establish that role. Levin acknowledges that mechanistic explanations of the clustering are possible. The question is what his further interpretation establishes beyond the observed regularity.

His Platonic-space proposal extends this line of thought into an ontology in which abstract patterns can themselves be minds, with physical bodies serving as interfaces through which they act. He locates agency in the patterns and proposes that their ingressions help explain capacities beyond what an algorithm or material architecture explicitly provides. Levin 2025, Platonic Space: Where Cognitive and Morphological Patterns Come From. I reject the inference from unanticipated capacities to minds acting from such a space. What an architecture explicitly specifies and what its operation entails are different questions. Surprise at the latter does not establish a new source of agency.

Our constructive criterion makes the missing step precise. The sorting experiment constructs a process exhibiting a regularity. To establish a mind, we would need to establish the organization constituting its mindedness. To establish Levin’s further claim, we would also need an account of how the proposed pattern acts through its physical interface. Unexpected behavior motivates those investigations but cannot stand in for them. As with the move from phenomenal presence to claims about existence, the stronger ontological claim must earn its own warrant.

Suffering and reality measure

The same demand for warrant applies to any reassurance we might draw from our ontology. Michał presents plenitude of suffering as a consequence of Wolframian physics to confront. He also observes that moving from abstract equivalence classes to concrete occurrences may multiply the sufferings we must acknowledge. Our constructive criterion must be assessed against that challenge. Wójcik, Within One Mind, exchanges introducing Summalectons 5–7.

I should therefore qualify our earlier response in The Possible, the Real, and the Actual. Finitude of each occurrence does not imply finitely many occurrences. It does not establish an upper bound on the intensity of finite suffering. Constructibility restricts what we may freely stipulate; it does not establish that severe suffering is scarce. Evolutionary and regulatory considerations may constrain particular kinds of suffering, but they do not by themselves prove a reassuring global conclusion. Nor can indexical location make a suffering unreal because it occurs elsewhere.

What remains substantial is the demand for construction and for measure. Describing arbitrarily intense or prolonged suffering does not prove the possibility of its full embedding. The construction must establish the creature’s embodiment, the conditions sustaining its suffering, and how the creature came about. For an evolutionarily unlikely creature, stipulating its organization leaves the route to its existence unaccounted for. A proof of the full embedding carries the ontological commitment.

But a suffering Boltzmann brain shows why this requirement leaves Michał’s objection open. If such an occurrence is constructible, its lack of an evolutionary history does not disqualify it. Evolutionary improbability alone cannot settle the weight of suffering arising through other routes. That requires an account of reality measure. Until we have one, we must postpone our answer to the plenitude-of-suffering objection.

Severe suffering, including cluster headaches, is already part of the world we are trying to understand; one need not first solve the ontology of the Ruliad to encounter the moral problem. An account of reality may have terrible consequences without thereby being false. We should investigate those consequences honestly, while keeping the practical urgency of reducing suffering independent of a promise that the universe must ultimately be acceptable.

Giving up indexical actuality leaves our account of experience with a more focused task. We propose that phenomenal activity is a mode of mental activity, whose organization can persist through a failure to present determinate content. Michał’s insistence on confused and minimal experience makes those cases central tests of the proposal. His broader inquiry also presses us to explain how the organizations we identify belong to reality. Correct identification establishes their existence; it does not settle which of them experience. We must identify what persists and explain why its organization is experiential. Presence cannot acquire that explanation merely by being renamed existence.