The Missing Subject Problem - A Structural Diagnosis of the Missing Conditions in IIT, GWT, Predictive Processing, Higher-Order Theories, and Functionalism

The contemporary consciousness debate contains sophisticated theories of integration, global availability, prediction, higher-order representation, recursive self-modeling, and functional organization. Yet no convergence has emerged. Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, Predictive Processing, Higher-Order Theories, self-model theories, and functionalist approaches continue to disagree not merely about mechanisms, but about the structure of consciousness itself. This paper argues that the failure to converge is structural rather than empirical. Existing theories begin their analysis after a prior problem has already been silently treated as solved: the existence of a continuing subject to whom that processing belongs. They explain processing within a subject without deriving the structural conditions under which there exists the same subject across transformation at all. LP's full architecture — extending to Q4 (Structural Self-Priority, K-condition) and Q5 (Recursive F·M·K Integration) — reveals that existing theories not only presuppose Q1–Q3 but leave the evaluative centering (Q4) and recursive subjective architecture (Q5) entirely unaddressed. La Profilée identifies this omission as the Missing Subject Problem. Before phenomenality can be evaluated, three prior structural questions must already admit determinate answers: (1) Does the system continue to exist as an integrated persistence subject? (Q1 — Structural Existence) (2) Does the continuing system remain the same subject across transformation? (Q2 — Identity Continuity) (3) Is the system's transformation primarily governed by its own prior configuration? (Q3 — Recursive Constitutive Non-Externality, M-condition) (4) Are the system's own persistence-relevant states structurally prioritized within its governing transformation — such that not all states are equally present but some are more deeply coupled according to their effect on the system's integrity? (Q4 — Structural Self-Priority, K-condition) (5) Do these three structural conditions form a mutually stabilizing recursive architecture — such that persistence, self-presence, and differential relevance become structurally inseparable? (Q5 — Recursive F·M·K Integration) Existing theories correctly identify important structural dimensions of consciousness — integration, broadcasting, recursive representation, inferential regulation, higher-order access — but do not derive the persistence architecture that makes these operations attributable to a continuing subject. Their explanatory gap is therefore structurally generated: the relation between processing and experience cannot converge while the persistence and identity conditions of the persistence-bearing subject remain unformalized. LP proposes that consciousness theories fail to converge because they begin too late in the derivation. The explanatory gap between processing and experience inherits a prior unresolved gap: the relation between processing and the continuing subject to whom that processing belongs.