Overview
At a glance
- The “toll”: an added structure-to-experience identity
- Four stations: IIT, HOT, GWT, AST
- Cost falls on a verdict in either direction, eliminativism included
- Wittgenstein declines without paying — negative toll not general
- Preclusion, not refutation
The lane’s synthesis: ruling on whether experience is present carries a structural cost, and leading theories of consciousness incur it wherever they convert structural description into a verdict on presence.
The presence of a structural property entails no verdict on experience, positive or negative — so a theory that rules experience present, or rules it absent, adds what structure does not supply. That added commitment, an asserted identity between a structural measure and experience, is here called the toll, and it is located at four stations: Integrated Information Theory’s identity of Φ-structure with experience; Higher-Order Theory’s move from represented to felt; Global Workspace Theory’s identification of broadcast-availability with experience; and, in the negative, Attention Schema Theory’s denial-licensed dissolution.
The cost falls on a verdict in either direction, eliminativism included. What avoids it is declining the verdict — and declining is not one thing: at least one non-framework position, Wittgenstein on private language, declines without paying, so the negative toll is not general. A structure-first program characterizes disclosed structure and declines the verdict from its own ontological ground: one principled non-payer among several, distinctive in route rather than unique. The account is preclusion, not refutation, and is conditional throughout on a materiality-as-exchange posit carried openly and not defended here.
What it claims / What it does not claim
What it claims
The toll, located. Converting a structural measure into a verdict on presence adds an identity claim structure does not supply — traced through four stations: IIT’s Φ-identity, HOT’s represented-to-felt, GWT’s broadcast-availability, and AST’s denial-licensed dissolution.
Declining as a principled route. The cost falls on any verdict, eliminativism included; a structure-first program declines the verdict from its own ontological ground — one principled non-payer among several, distinctive in route rather than unique.
What it does not claim
Preclusion, not refutation. By the paper’s own statement, the account precludes rather than refutes; it does not disprove the theories at their stations, but locates the cost each incurs in ruling.
The negative toll is not general. Declining is not one thing — Wittgenstein on private language declines without paying — so the framework’s route is not the only principled one, and the whole argument is conditional on a materiality-as-exchange posit carried openly and not defended here.
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