The Process Model of Consciousness: A Living Process Identity Theory

The Process Model of Consciousness (TPMOC) proposes that consciousness is not an additional property produced after neural or computational processing, but the intrinsic occurrence of a living, historically continuous self-world process. A living organism does not encounter the world as neutral information: because it must continually produce, preserve, and revise itself, changes acquire significance relative to its continued existence, bodily condition, history, needs, and possible actions. In sufficiently integrated organisms, these relations are organized into a continuing perspective from which a world appears. TPMOC conjectures that this organized occurrence itself constitutes experience; no additional internal observer is required. Version 3.0 substantially revises earlier formulations following an adversarial program that produced several genuine negative results. Model-recovery tests failed to uniquely distinguish TPMOC from strong rivals, boundary analyses demonstrated that causal evidence does not always recover a unique subject, a propofol-EEG audit found no incremental advantage for the tested TPMOC process variables, and finite state-augmentation showed that sufficiently permissive rival models can reproduce tested pathways. Rather than reinterpret these failures as confirmation, TPMOC 3.0 incorporates them as constraints on the theory. The resulting framework separates three questions: the living organization proposed to underlie consciousness, the process-identity conjecture that its active occurrence is experience, and the empirical methods capable of testing that conjecture. It replaces a single consciousness score and absolute subject boundary with prospective neurophenomenological comparisons involving ownership, agency, embodiment, history, endogenous normativity, and self-world organization. Crucially, TPMOC requires prospective separation from its strongest admissible rivals before confirmatory testing: where competing theories cannot generate distinguishable predictions, no TPMOC-specific empirical claim is warranted. TPMOC 3.0 therefore does not claim empirical confirmation. It presents a constrained, falsifiable research program centered on the hypothesis that consciousness is the active constructed present of an autonomous, historically conditioned self-world process.