Structure over Illusion: Challenging Metzinger’s Representationalism through a Constructive Physicalist Alternative Part III: Minimal Phenomenal Experience as a Misapprehension of Mechanics

This paper advances two arguments against Thomas Metzinger's Minimal Phenomenal Experience (MPE) account, specifically his claim that “pure awareness” operates from a foundational, selfless “zero-person perspective.” First, the MPE framework is architecturally incoherent from within. It generates cascading explanatory gaps by failing to specify the mechanisms required to transition between functional tonic alertness, the zero-person baseline, and a first-person memory report, and by abandoning foundational temporal constraints without replacement. Furthermore, via the Spontaneity Prior Trilemma described herein, the paper demonstrates that every structural scenario available to sustain the asserted zero-person state requires active suppression, mental action, or internal boundaries, directly violating the MPE account's own core constraints. Additionally, if this alleged state were genuinely sustained by an autonomous subpersonal prior, it should logically become the brain's default state during sleep; instead, empirical sleep data demonstrates it remains a statistical anomaly. Second, utilizing the Cartesian Recursive Consciousness (CRC) framework, the paper demonstrates that the reported zero-person state is not a pre-egoic foundation. Rather, it is the fully active reflexive consciousness architecture operating under deliberate input control. By systematically restricting the external Objective Data stream, the system geometrically integrates primarily Substrate Data from a self-reinforcing biological feedback loop with increasing saturation. Ultimately, because the system lacks introspective access to this active integration, the process is Linguistically Compressed into ontological labels like pure awareness and mistakenly identified as a foundational MPE state. Finally, this biological account of the meditative process generates a falsifiable prediction that empirically distinguishes the CRC framework from the MPE account.