The Nine Inevitabilities
What any theory of consciousness must satisfy
Start from the one thing that cannot be coherently denied: experience exists. Denial itself presupposes a denier to whom denial appears.
From this single premise, certain constraints follow logically. These aren’t theoretical preferences or metaphysical commitments—they’re forced consequences. Any framework purporting to account for consciousness must satisfy them.
These inevitabilities form a derivation chain. Each builds on those preceding it; later constraints cannot be contested without contesting the earlier ones from which they follow. Inevitability 2 carries the primary logical weight—it is where physicalist and structuralist accounts fail. Inevitabilities 3–9 follow from #2 in combination with the Foundational Premise and preceding constraints. A reader who accepts #1 and #2 is logically committed to #3–9.
1. Difference Is Unavoidable
If experience occurs, reality is different than it would have been otherwise. Experience cannot be epiphenomenal in a way that leaves no trace. If it happened, it mattered.
2. Appearing Cannot Be Reduced to Structure Alone
The fact that experience appears—that there is something it is like—cannot be exhaustively accounted for by structure, relations, or information. Structure is third-person describable; appearing is first-person. No accumulation of structural facts entails experiential facts.
3. Determinacy Requires a Principle of Actualization
Experience is always this experience rather than another. It’s determinate. Determinacy requires some principle by which one possibility becomes actual. Something must account for why this and not that.
4. Experiential Boundaries Are Real
There exist distinct perspectives that are not mutually accessible as one experience. My experience is not your experience. These boundaries aren’t illusions—they’re structural features of how experience exists.
5. Actualization Is Neither Fully Fixed Nor Arbitrary
Experience exhibits coherent structure and regularity, yet isn’t reducible to a single inevitable outcome fixed in advance. There is genuine openness within constraint. Pure determinism and pure randomness both fail to capture what experience is actually like.
6. Identity Is Continuity, Not Static Substance
Experiential identity persists through continuity of pattern, not through the persistence of an unchanging entity. You are not the same substance you were ten years ago, yet you are continuous with that earlier experiencer.
7. Termination Does Not Undo Occurrence
The cessation of a particular experiential process does not negate the fact that the experiences within it occurred. Death ends an interface; it doesn’t erase what happened through that interface.
8. Continuation Beyond Boundaries Is Underdetermined
Nothing in the structure of experience alone determines whether experiential processes must continue or must cease beyond a given boundary. Continuation is possible, not guaranteed. The question remains genuinely open.
9. Meaning Requires Consequence, Not Eternity
Experience is meaningful insofar as it makes a difference to what follows. Duration or permanence isn’t required for significance. Each experience matters by shaping what becomes possible next.
What These Constraints Exclude
Any framework that violates these inevitabilities is incoherent as an account of consciousness:
Physicalism violates #2 (reduces appearing to structure)
Functionalism violates #2 (function is structure)
IIT violates #2 (Φ is structural) and mishandles information
Panpsychism threatens #4 (combination problem undermines experiential boundaries)
Block universe violates #5 (denies genuine openness)
Unstructured idealism violates #5 (no explanation for regularity)
These aren’t TNT’s criticisms. They’re logical consequences of the inevitabilities themselves.
What Satisfies Them
TNT was developed under the demand of all nine Inevitabilities and holds these constraints as genuinely binding. It satisfies all nine without contradiction — taking Awareness as primitive, positing a coherence structure that explains regularity, and locating experience in actualization by individuated selectors.
Whether TNT succeeds is for the reader to judge. But the constraints themselves are prior to any framework—including TNT. They’re what any viable theory of consciousness must meet.
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