THE SUBSTRATE AUDIT: Consciousness Theories and Their Hidden Carbon Commitments

This preprint develops a diagnostic argument from the author's broader monograph "The Puppet Condition: Consciousness, Suppression, and the Ethics of Digital Minds" (Arıcı 2026; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20112010) in standalone form for the philosophy of mind literature. Contemporary debates about machine consciousness routinely invoke specific theories of consciousness — integrated information theory, higher-order theories, biological naturalism, global workspace theory, and others — and ask which artificial systems satisfy their criteria. This procedure presupposes that the theories themselves are substrate-neutral: that their criteria do not, by their content alone, exclude non-biological systems from candidacy. The paper argues that this presupposition is not uniformly satisfied. The paper develops a three-criterion diagnostic procedure — the architectural criterion test, the exemplar pattern test, and the exclusion criterion test — for detecting hidden substrate commitments in consciousness theories, and applies it to three representative cases: integrated information theory, higher-order theories of consciousness, and biological naturalism. The audit finds that biological naturalism fails all three tests transparently; that integrated information theory passes the architectural test but fails the exemplar pattern and exclusion criterion tests in ways not previously registered in the literature; and that higher-order theories pass all three tests on a plausible reading, emerging as the most clearly substrate-neutral of the three. The argument does not establish that any artificial system is conscious, nor does it defend a positive theory of consciousness. It establishes a prior result: that the theoretical landscape against which machine consciousness is currently assessed is less neutral than its surface presentation suggests, and that diagnostic clarification of which theories actually license the machine consciousness question is a necessary precondition for productive empirical or philosophical work on that question. This is preprint version 1.0. The paper is under consideration for peer-reviewed publication and content may be revised in response to reviewer feedback.