Experience as the Inner Side of Systemic Relevance: A Dual-Aspect Account of Consciousness

This paper develops a dual-aspect account of consciousness based on the concept of systemic relevance. It argues that structural and informational descriptions can explain how systems process differences, but not why such differences appear from within as qualitative experience. The central proposal is that experience is the inner aspect of systemic relevance: the way in which differences matter to bounded, self-maintaining, and integrated systems. Information marks difference; systemic relevance marks difference-for-a-system; experience is relevance from within. Pain, for example, is not merely information about tissue damage, but tissue damage as negatively relevant to the organism. The paper distinguishes information from relevance, experience from consciousness, and consciousness from self-consciousness. It situates the model in relation to the hard problem, dual-aspect theory, panpsychism, panexperientialism, integrated information theory, and free-energy approaches. The model does not claim to derive experience from physics, but offers a framework in which experience does not require an unexplained emergence from non-experience.