Neither Building nor Fundamental Consciousness: Constitutive Identity at Organizational Thresholds

The metaphysics of consciousness has been conducted within three options—reductive physicalism, productive emergence, and the fundamentality of consciousness at the basic physical level—and a fourth has been argued to be available: constitutive identity at organizational thresholds, on which a phenomenal feature is what a self-maintaining system’s organization is from within itself. This paper defends the fourth option against two developments since it was first stated. The first is a turn toward building: Bennett’s unification of the building relations, the neo-Aristotelian revival of hylomorphism, and the proliferating philosophy-of-science accounts of emergence. The second is a turn toward more sophisticated forms of fundamental consciousness: recent cosmopsychism, perennial idealism, and pan-agentialism. The defense sharpens rather than merely preserves the claim, by identifying for each family the single feature that excludes constitutive identity from it: symmetry under description excludes it from the building relations and the emergence family; its holding of organizational closures rather than properties excludes it from type-identity theory; and the requirement that determinate phenomenal content be structurally individuated is what the fundamental-consciousness positions cannot meet without either leaving content brute or relocating the individuating structure to organizational thresholds. Integrated information theory, which ties phenomenality to structural conditions as the framework does but takes experience as primary, falls to the substantive side of that same symmetry feature: it asserts a symmetric identity yet ranks experience ahead of the structure, where constitutive identity ranks neither. Constitutive identity is identity without being type-identity, and structural without being a relation of building—the position the contemporary dialectic converges toward and declines to occupy.