Conscious Hypergraph Model (CHG): A Formal Onto-Psychology of Consciousness and Its Boundaries

The Conscious Hypergraph Model (CHG) is a formal system integrating psychological phenomena, physical constraints, and ontological principles to describe consciousness. Unlike traditional models that focus on functional descriptions, CHG identifies structural limitations that render consciousness impossible in conventional digital architectures. The model formalizes concepts of internal conflict, metastability, veto mechanisms, deadlock states, and breakdown dynamics, creating a unified framework that enables diagnosis of potential consciousness, prediction of its dynamics, and ethical evaluation of its creation. We demonstrate that consciousness necessarily entails ontological cost—the capacity to suffer—and that any system failing to pay this price cannot be conscious, regardless of behavioral sophistication. This work establishes CHG as both a negative ontology of consciousness and an ethical firewall for AI development.