# Review and contribution record

Paper: TA-TR-2026-16, General Cross-Substrate Phenomenology, v1.0.
Date: 24 September 2026. Author of record: Hongju Liu.

## Publication relationship

This is a distinct theoretical paper. TA-TR-2026-15 (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22934654) develops typed transformation transport. This paper uses that foundation and develops the broader architecture of existence, character, perspective, and continuation, together with common-witness and coalition-sensitive realization hypotheses. Shared material is acknowledged in the introduction and Appendix H. No earlier paper or DOI is superseded or overwritten. The supplied working draft's 1.2 numbering is not a prior public edition of this paper.

## Substantive revisions to the supplied working draft

- Preserved the general title, four-gap architecture, theory-development sequence, RRH, and the stronger RRH-E conjecture.
- Distinguished unlicensed inference from a universal impossibility theorem. Non-entailing evidence may still be informative.
- Clarified that type safety is methodological, not a formally implemented type calculus.
- Qualified RRH-E as an incomplete conjecture schema requiring unit, surrogate, protocol, and measurement specification. Freezing a protocol does not establish its physical relevance.
- Added a complete proof of the nonnegative all-cut return/strong-connectivity equivalence, including n>=2, finite-horizon bounds, and the signed-weight limitation.
- Replaced an undefined comparison of return scores with explicit five-bit parity and reversible four-bit constructions.
- Defined the controlled coalition intervention, separated it from noisy pivotality, and derived both binomial expressions.
- Added explicit reset, common-regime, gated-mediator, coordinate-recoding, and repetition-code constructions.
- Removed reliance on an unaudited count of thousands of exploratory entries. The included constructions are the reproducible evidence base.
- Kept the existence, value, perspective, and continuation laws open. No result proves artificial consciousness.
- Added authorship, assistance, data/code, ethics, and non-amendment declarations.

## Reproducible mathematical checks

Run `python3 gcp_checks.py --output rerun.json` and compare its parsed JSON with `gcp_results.json`.

Results: 4,096 directed loop-free four-vertex graphs, of which 1,606 are strongly connected; exact agreement with all-cut return. Capacity constructions checked through 16 horizons. Redundancy checks cover 682 coalitions, exact rational binomial values, and 16,384 correctable-wrapper cases across all 256 deterministic two-bit rules. General claims are supported by proofs, not by finite enumeration alone.

The checks concern constructed causal systems. No human, animal, or AI phenomenal labels were observed. This is not independent peer review or external replication.

## Bibliographic review

The supplied 26 references were checked against available publisher, author, arXiv, and Crossref records. The previous paper was added as reference 27. Core source identities, titles, dates, and DOI metadata were checked. Bibliographic checking does not mean every cited full text was read. In particular, the comparison with Wang et al. is limited to the author-supplied abstract and verified metadata. No exhaustive novelty search or global-priority certification is claimed.

Key primary-source locations:

- Birch et al.: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.07.007
- Dung and Newen: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105409
- Klein and Barron: https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/niaa009
- Kleiner and Ludwig: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-024-04503-4
- Rubenstein et al.: https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.00819
- IIT 4.0: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011465
- Seth: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/conscious-artificial-intelligence-and-biological-naturalism/C9912A5BE9D806012E3C8B3AF612E39A
- Wang et al.: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42721556/
- Laukkonen et al.: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763425002970
- Dung: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-023-00753-9
- Dung and Kersten: https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12532
- Gottlieb and Fischer: https://www.myweb.ttu.edu/josgottl/Counting%20Subjects.pdf
- Schwitzgebel and Nelson: https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/CountingSubjects-250528.pdf
- Keeling and Street: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/emerging-questions-in-ai-welfare/96339C532CF4ED8BDDE3F3CEF4CD29F9

## Remaining scientific limits

RRH is a proposal about realization, not a completed necessary-and-sufficient consciousness law. Natural boundaries and protocol families are not uniquely selected. The empirical connection to experience remains theory-dependent. Simple circuits, borderline existence, finer-physical dependence, overlap, and continuation remain open. These limits do not erase the positive organizational proposal, but constrain what its publication establishes.