General Cross-Substrate Phenomenology

Hongju Liu · TA-TR-2026-16 · Version 1.0 · 24 September 2026

English theoretical preprint; substantially AI-assisted, human-responsible, not peer reviewed.

Abstract

Comparisons of phenomenal consciousness across humans, non-human animals, artificial systems, and distributed processes require separating phenomenal existence from character, valence, perspective, and continuation. This paper develops General Cross-Substrate Phenomenology as a typed research architecture in which causal descriptions, evidence, and psychophysical bridges retain distinct roles. Human experience supplies an epistemic anchor without defining a universal experiential coordinate system. Cross-substrate claims are represented by scoped transformation signatures and transport certificates. The framework builds on an earlier transport account with a sequence of explicit causal counterexamples: graph connectivity need not preserve differentiated information; reset interventions can create diagnostic effects; incompatible regimes cannot jointly witness a claimed organization; recoding must preserve intervention semantics; and redundancy can hide causal participation from every single-carrier replacement. Finite constructions, proofs, and reproducible checks establish these diagnostic limitations within their stated models. They motivate a redundancy-aware relational-realization hypothesis, conditional on a causal-structural account of experience. A stronger existence-bridge schema is retained as a conjectural research target, with its unresolved boundary-selection, protocol-selection, and measurement requirements stated explicitly. The result is an architecture for constructing and comparing psychophysical theories, not an empirically validated consciousness detector. Its contribution lies in integrating typed transport, common-regime constraints, and coalitional diagnostics while preserving the distinction between mathematical results, methodological proposals, and unresolved psychophysical laws.

Relationship and research boundary

This broader theoretical paper builds on the comparison methodology of TA-TR-2026-15. Its additional focus is common-witness causal organization, redundancy-aware participation, and realization hypotheses connecting existence, character, perspective, and continuation. The predecessor remains a distinct paper with its own DOI. Shared foundations are disclosed; neither paper is independent corroboration of the other.

This is first-party Adjacent Research Program scholarship (L4). It does not amend, define, validate, or authoritatively interpret the Trinity Accord. Formal checks concern causal constructions, not empirical evidence of consciousness. RRH-E remains a conjecture schema requiring further specification.

Exact-version OTS and Arweave status. Timestamp submission, Bitcoin verification and Arweave readback are separate states.

Research series