Epistemic Horizons: A Computational Theory of Consciousness, Perspective, and Knowability

Assume the computational theory of mind: mental life is realized by processes whose character is fixed by their causal organization. This paper advances the centered-knowledge thesis: consciousness begins when alternative conditions place a process in different internal states that it can use to govern its future. A distinction made usable in this way is knowledge for that process; phenomenal character is the inside of occupying the resulting knowledge state. The thesis offers a reductive answer to the hard problem: experience is not a second fact accompanying centered knowledge, but what possessing that knowledge amounts to for the process whose activity it governs. Organizational invariance follows instead of entering as a separate assumption: a substitution that preserves every constitutive distinction and use preserves the phenomenal character they constitute. Language, memory, emotion, recurrence, and self-modeling organize richer forms of experience; none is required to make knowledge present to its possessor. A substitution level marks the process’s epistemic boundary: implementation details that can vary behind a functionally invariant interface remain outside its access, while distinctions that cross the interface enter its point of view. This account unifies problems concerning qualia, binding, private and divided minds, artificial consciousness, mental causation, skeptical doubt, and freedom. Its strength lies in explaining more through one relation while assuming less about what minimal experience requires. Subjectivity is objective causal organization viewed from the operative position of the process that instantiates it.