How Worlds Appear: Consciousness, Integration, and Dante’s Divine Comedy

Abstract This paper develops the model proposed in The Architecture of Experience: Consciousness as an Integrative Field, according to which conscious experience is not a passive representation of an external world but an active process that generates structured domains. The central problem is not how perception corresponds to reality, but how experience comes to appear as a coherent world at all. Through comparison with Dante’s Divine Comedy, the paper reinterprets its cosmology as a model of structured experience rather than a description of ontologically given realms. It argues that consciousness functions as an integrative field in which neural, bodily, social, and environmental processes combine to produce coherent experiential configurations. The analysis highlights a shift from descriptive cosmology to generative explanation, reframing the structure of experience as dynamically produced rather than metaphysically fixed.