Consciousness Substrate Theory

Consciousness Substrate Theory (CST) is a regime-based framework for characterizing consciousness capacity from passive electrophysiology. Its central claim is that consciousness capacity is not well described by signal magnitude, complexity alone, information content alone, or a single monotonic scalar “consciousness score.” Instead, CST proposes that consciousness capacity is a bounded dynamical regime property: a system must sustain spatially extended, metastable integration under structured constraint, while avoiding both fragmentation and pathological, weakly constrained propagation. In this formulation, consciousness-relevant dynamics are expressed through a latent field variable rather than being identified directly with the electroencephalogram (EEG) itself. This manuscript presents CST in full detail. First, it lays out the conceptual thesis: consciousness capacity depends jointly on propagation and constraint, and both too little integration and too much unconstrained integration can be nonviable. Second, it formalizes the theory using a canonical nonlinear field equation and its graph-discretized implementation on EEG-derived substrates. Third, it documents the empirical pipeline in detail, including preprocessing, graph construction, local forcing derived from per-channel Lempel–Ziv complexity, numerical integration, and spectral estimation of an effective integration length, Λeff. Fourth, it synthesizes the empirical findings across heterogeneous passive EEG cohorts spanning wakefulness, sleep, sleep deprivation, sedation, neurodegenerative conditions, and disorders of consciousness (DOC). In the labeled DOC data, CST yields the qualitative pattern of long-range propagation paired with reduced structure—an “active but unconstrained” substrate. In an additional blind mixed cohort containing healthy and DOC participants without subject-level labels available during analysis, CST separates the recordings into two major regimes whose proportions approximately match the cohort description, providing a form of unsupervised validation. The manuscript also clarifies what CST does and does not claim. CST is not a theory of phenomenal content, not an assertion that consciousness is literally the field variable itself, and not a replacement for all other theories of consciousness. Rather, CST is a substrate viability framework intended to quantify whether a macroscopic neural system occupies a regime capable of supporting experience. The theory is presented together with explicit falsifiability conditions, transparency commitments, implementation details, limitations, and a roadmap toward perturbational and anatomically grounded extensions.