Consciousness as Intrinsic Structure: Towards a Chemistry of Experience

arXiv:2608.11398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To be conscious is to have an experience - not a collection of phenomenal atoms, but a structured whole composed of distinctions and the relations that bind them. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) identifies the essential properties of every experience (axioms), formulates them operationally as postulates that a substrate must satisfy, and unfolds the cause-effect power of the resulting complex into a $\Phi$-structure. Accounting for a content of experience is then a matter of identifying the phenomenal distinctions and relations that compose it, and showing them reflected one-to-one in the causal distinctions and relations of the corresponding $\Phi$-structure. We apply that method to three pervasive contents whose structure is partly open to introspection. Spatial extendedness is composed of spots, whose elemental signature is reflexivity, bound by reflexive inclusion, connection, and fusion; temporal flow is composed of moments, whos