Processual Ontology and the Two-Gate Threshold for Consciousness

Existing theories of consciousness — Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, higher-order theories — rely on single-metric thresholds that fail to account for well-documented dissociations between neural complexity and conscious experience. This manuscript develops a processual ontology in which temporally extended relational configurations, rather than fixed substances, are treated as ontologically primary, and derives from it a two-gate model of consciousness. The first gate requires that a system's capacity vector — comprising integration, temporal coherence, processing complexity, and coupling strength — exceeds a critical threshold (C* > C_crit). The second gate requires that these capacity components exhibit harmonic organization, operationalized as a multiplicative function of synergy, metastability, and dynamical consonance (H > h_c). Neither condition alone is sufficient: systems with high capacity but low harmony (e.g., epileptic seizures) and systems with high harmony but low capacity (e.g., fragmentary dream states) are predicted to lack full consciousness. The framework generates three levels of falsifiable prediction: (1) that the joint threshold classifies conscious and unconscious states more accurately than any single existing metric across anesthesia, sleep, and disorders-of-consciousness datasets; (2) that specific high-C/low-H and low-C/high-H dissociations obtain in the predicted directions; and (3) that ordered collapse of harmony components under graded anesthesia follows the sequence H_D → H_M → H_Ω. The theory does not dissolve the hard problem of consciousness but localizes it — transforming the maximally general question "why is there consciousness at all?" into the contrastive, empirically tractable question "what distinguishes this specific processual regime from adjacent regimes of the same system under the same laws?" Threshold values C_crit and h_c are not stipulated a priori but are to be calibrated empirically against established paradigms. Three appendices specify the full operationalization protocol, empirical testing framework, and computational simulation architecture.