Overview
At a glance
- Pays the “forbidding half” of a promised disjunction
- No state-indexed criterion licenses an inference to experience
- General result, argued before any theory is named
- IIT 4.0 met in its own terms, in §IV
- The disclosing half remains owed
The second paper in the lane opens by restating a debt. “Not Less, But Other” ended owing a single worked case; this paper pays one half of it and reports, in the open, what remains unpaid.
The promise was a disjunction. This paper pays the forbidding half: it shows that the inference the equals-sign view permits — from a structural measure taken at a state to the presence of experience — is unlicensed, and shows it generally, for any criterion built the way ours have been built. Working toward the missing demonstration produced an unanticipated finding, which the paper judges worth more than the half that got paid: the unpaid debt is a measurement problem, and the measurement problem is a posture problem before it is an instrument problem.
The general result is stated before any theory is named: registers do not return, because a register cannot revisit a state — the second visit is differently arrived-at, and arrival is part of what the register is. Only then, in §IV, does an existing theory enter — Integrated Information Theory, met in its own terms as the most serious and explicit instance of the general situation, because it is the one place the question has been formalized with full rigor. The disclosing half — a worked case in which the relabeled view carries content the equals-sign view cannot — is not here. It remains owed.
What it claims / What it does not claim
What it claims
The forbidding half. No state-indexed criterion can license an inference from a structural measure to the presence of experience — a general result holding for any criterion built the way ours have been, argued before any theory is named.
Registers do not return. A register cannot revisit a state, because arrival is constitutive of the register; the second visit is differently arrived-at. The measurement gap is diagnosed as a posture problem before an instrument problem.
What it does not claim
The disclosing half is still owed. By the paper’s own statement, the worked case in which the relabeled view carries content the equals-sign view cannot is not delivered here; only the forbidding half is paid.
No neutral-ground refutation. Everything is conditional on one commitment granted openly in §III; nothing refutes any theory on neutral ground. IIT 4.0 is met in its own terms, without dismissal and without shrinking the disagreement.
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