A Stake in the Report: Level Collapse, Report Failure, and the Limits of the Cross-State Test

The Explanatory Gap as Dimensional Mismatch adopts Narens's separation of two axioms: commutativity certifies that felt intensity admits a ratio scale, multiplicativity certifies that the numerals a subject utters may be read as the numbers they name. It then declares that the account needs the scale and has no stake in the report. This paper shows that the declaration holds within a state and fails across states. A sedated subject reports through machinery the drug is attenuating, so magnitude estimation returns the coupling coefficient multiplied by a report channel, and the two are identified only through their product. The cross-modal prediction of The Anesthetic Test survives, since the report channel is common to the modalities and cancels from any comparison between them, though what a positive result licenses is weaker than before, the disjunction it leaves open now including a change in scale use with no sensory correlate. The proportional step relating felt intensity to a ratio of perturbational complexity values does not survive: the index can serve as the calibration or as the validandum, but not as both in one experiment. The principal claim concerns the framework's own taxonomy of altered states. A failure of report and a collapse of level are observationally equivalent under magnitude estimation, so a refutation condition the framework states as empirically live cannot be adjudicated by the instrument it proposes. A constructive proposal follows: granting the linearity that step already assumes, perturbational complexity calibrates the report channel and makes its sedated-to-waking ratio measurable, a quantity sedation psychophysics has never identified separately from the experience it reports. An appendix corrects the form of the stimulus drive across four papers in the series.