Intentionality, Projection, and the Mind-First Terminus: Why Maximising Explanatory Power Requires a Consciousness-First Ontology

Contemporary AI systems produce outputs that invite intentional description: they appear to pursue goals, exercise judgment, and respond to meaning. This paper argues that such attributions are mistaken. They result from anthropomorphic projection onto recursively optimised pattern-completion processes that lack intrinsic semantic presence or aboutness. Output sophistication does not entail genuine intentionality. Clarifying this distinction reveals what intentionality requires: irreducible first-person presence not derivable from computational or physical structure. The paper advances a positive case for a consciousness-first ontology along two independent lines. First, a presupposition argument shows that every coherent epistemic enterprise presupposes intelligibility as the invariant condition of logical and normative binding; because such binding cannot be derived from non-normative structure without circularity, the ultimate ground must be intrinsically intelligible. This result is formalised in Lemma 5.2 (the Dependency Exhaustion Lemma), which establishes that intelligibility must be either derivative or non-derivative, and Corollary 5.2a, which establishes that any ground instantiating non-derivative intelligibility must be mind-like in constitution. Second, the Convergence Under Constraint proof demonstrates that any reasoning system operating under maximal explanatory adequacy, non-eliminativism, and rejection of brute termination faces an exhaustively partitioned space of termination strategies. Only intrinsic-intelligibility termination survives. The irreducibility of consciousness independently confirms this result. Convergence on a mind-first terminus is therefore a structural necessity rather than a sociological or corpus-dependent outcome. Situated within Dynamic Meaning Architecture (DMA), this conclusion provides the philosophical foundation for a consciousness-first metaphysics whose systematic implications are developed in the companion framework.