Tractatus de Conscientia: A Tractatus-Style Sketch Toward a Modern, Physically Operational Theory of Consciousness

Abstract

Tractatus de Conscientia is a tractatus-style sketch toward a modern, physically operational account of consciousness. It is also a tractatus-style attempt to talk about consciousness in a way that stays close to what we can actually test and build. It pushes back against two common moves: treating consciousness as a mysterious extra "stuff," and treating it as nothing more than outward behavior. The central idea is to keep three things separate: what appears for an agent (the lived "given"), what is accessible (what can shape report, control, memory, or other records), and what structure remains when we change descriptions (the invariants of organization). On this view, a conscious episode isn't a mathematical instant. It has a short duration during which many internal distinctions are pulled together into one perspective and held stable enough to guide action--and sometimes to be reported. Unity is captured as a kind of "whole-over-parts" surplus: the system, over a chosen timescale and partition, carries more integrated predictive power than its pieces considered separately, and that surplus must also be available to access channels (so we don't count integration that never makes a difference to anything the agent can do or say). The self, in turn, is treated less like a hidden entity and more like a dynamical role--a self-index that helps bind episodes over time by stabilizing prediction and control across changing contexts. The tractatus also stresses a hard limit: every piece of evidence about consciousness requires coupling to the system, and coupling changes what we observe. So there is no protocol-free, perfectly private "identifier" of what-it-is-like. Consciousness is something we infer and attribute under explicit measurement setups, conventions, and uncertainty bounds--and we should be willing to say "we can't tell" when identifiability runs out.