_Layered Causal Realism II_ : Qualia, Deliberation, and Phenomenal Attribution

Debates about consciousness persist not because decisive facts are missing, but because claims belonging to different explanatory layers have been compressed onto a single explanatory plane. This misalignment is difficult to detect precisely because the possibility of separation is embedded in the setup of the arguments themselves, rather than argued for independently. This paper applies a methodological constraint: correlation between layers does not authorize cross-layer entailment. The result is that many apparent metaphysical conflicts are products of layer compression rather than factual deficit. Structural criteria already exhaust the operational content of consciousness attribution: attributional practice has never depended on direct access to phenomenal ontology, and the problem of other minds does not block it. On this basis, the paper develops a positive account: deliberative structure, understood as the cross-temporal weighing, revision, and choice among competing reasons, provides the most stable structural anchor for phenomenal attribution. When this structure is isomorphic across systems, phenomenal description receives a prima facie warrant at the practical-normative layer, independently of ontological adjudication. The paper introduces Rualia to name the object of this attribution under ongoing ontological underdetermination. The burden of proof is thereby reversed: the demand that attribution wait for ontological closure is a theoretical position requiring independent justification, not a default epistemic neutrality.