The One as the Structural Lower Bound of Experience: Plotinus Meets Cognitive Constructivism

This paper offers a naturalized reinterpretation of Plotinus’s concept of to Hen (the One) within a contemporary constructivist account of mind. Rather than treating the One as an experiential object or as a directly attainable cognitive state, it is read as the structural lower bound toward which conscious experience can be simplified: a limit characterized by progressively reduced cognitive construction, weakened subject–object differentiation, and contraction toward present-centered awareness. A close reading of the Enneads brings Plotinian themes of simplicity, ineffability, and unity into dialogue with predictive processing, enactive cognition, and theories of minimal phenomenal experience. The paper introduces Present-Constrained Awareness to describe highly attenuated states in which temporal projection, conceptual articulation, and self-modeling are reduced. Stoic accounts of impressions, assent, and attention provide a complementary comparison while preserving the substantial differences between Stoic rationalism and Plotinian ascent. The central claim is asymptotic: minimal experiential states may approximate the structural conditions Plotinus associates with union, but they do not instantiate the One itself. On this reading, reports of extreme unity are cognitively intelligible without being treated as direct evidence of a separate metaphysical domain. The result is a cross-historical model that preserves the conceptual distance between Plotinus and contemporary cognitive science while making their structural comparison philosophically tractable.