Spike-Pattern Sufficiency for Manifest Consciousness: A Falsifiable Principle

Consciousness is ordinarily judged by first- person report, yet neuroscience shows such reports are fixed by temporal patterns of neural spiking. We derive, from two uncontroversial premises—causal efficacy of consciousness and neural mediation—a direct conditional deduction: manifest consciousness supervenes on the temporal spike-event pattern within the behaviourally decisive window. A behaviour-changing intervention that leaves spike timing within the stated tolerance would falsify this claim; none is known. Spike-pattern sufficiency therefore provides a natural working hypothesis, shifting the burden of proof to substrate- specific accounts and supplying a two-track empirical roadmap: (i) falsifiability via spike-silent-channel searches and (ii) verification-and-refinement via controlled spike-pattern duplication.