Beyond Emergence: Habitability as a Structural Criterion for Consciousness

Contemporary debates on consciousness often focus on the problem of emergence, seeking to explain how subjective experience arises from physical or functional processes. This paper argues that such formulations obscure a more fundamental ontological question: under what conditions can a system sustain conscious experience without fragmenting or collapsing? I propose the concept of *habitability* as a structural criterion for consciousness. Habitability refers to a system's capacity to sustain an integrated experiential field through coherent integration, experiential self-reference, attentional modulation, and temporal continuity. From this perspective, consciousness is neither an omnipresent property of reality nor a mere functional illusion, but a real, localized, and condition-dependent phenomenon. The habitability framework reorders the consciousness debate without reducing experience to information processing or invoking strong metaphysical claims, and offers a principled basis for evaluating altered states, disorders of consciousness, and artificial systems.