The Inward Closure Hypothesis: Experience as a World Held from Within

Consciousness may depend on information being internally held within a self-maintaining field of identity, distinction, binding, self-reference, and repair, rather than merely being processed or entering awareness. The Inward Closure Hypothesis proposes this as a bridge condition for conscious experience, distinguishing information usable by a system from information present as a world for a subject. The account contrasts local, action-oriented self-in-environment with human symbolic worldhood and is positioned alongside global workspace theory, integrated information theory, predictive processing, autopoiesis, enactivism, and self-model theory. The paper does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness but identifies a necessary condition for coherence-based accounts.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This working paper proposes the Inward Closure Hypothesis as a coherence-based bridge condition for conscious experience. It argues that consciousness should not be understood as raw information entering awareness, nor merely as information processed by a system, but as information internally held within a self-maintaining field of identity, distinction, binding, self-reference, and repair. The paper develops a structural account of inward holding as the transition from information usable by a system to information present as a world for a subject. It distinguishes local, action-oriented forms of self-in-environment from human symbolic worldhood, connects the proposal to the author’s Self-Verification Argument concerning absolute nothingness, and positions the hypothesis alongside global workspace theory, integrated information theory, predictive/free-energy approaches, autopoiesis, enactivism, and self-model theory. The claim is deliberately bounded: the paper does not claim to solve the hard problem of consciousness or deduce phenomenal experience from organization alone. Instead, it identifies a proposed bridge condition that any adequate coherence-based account of consciousness must address: how externally describable information becomes self-in-reality held from within.