Where Does Ineffability Come From? A Polar-Intelligence Theory of Consciousness and Qualia

This English master version substantially revises and expands v4.1 of this manuscript. Compared with v4.1, the present version reorganizes the theory under the name Polar Intelligence, integrates Part I and Part II into a single public draft, replaces the introductory Logos Intelligence / Mythos Intelligence vocabulary in Part II with the operational reference modes of the External Reference Frame (ERF) and the Body Reference Frame (BRF), and substantially revises the account of articulation residue, bodily response processes, affective drafts, emotion, higher-order consciousness, qualia, and testable predictions. This work proposes the Polar Intelligence model (PI model) as a theoretical account of why ineffability, qualia, and higher-order consciousness arise in human experience. Part I, "Philosophical and Evolutionary Foundations," develops the model through a philosophical essay on the tension between a Logos pole, which segments, names, measures, and shares the world, and a Mythos pole, which attunes the body to the world before it is fully objectified. Part II, "Consciousness Generation and Qualia: Mechanistic Foundations," re-describes this intuition as a mechanism: ERF segments and integrates the world into declarative structures, while BRF attunes to bodily sensations, bodily response processes, memory traces, articulation residue, and affective drafts within the body–world response. Consciousness is treated not as the product of a single center, but as a by-product of this constantly operating ERF/BRF loop. The model distinguishes declarative and non-declarative components of consciousness, separates bodily sensation labels from emotion labels, and proposes a two-phase account of qualia: non-declarative thickness as the first phase, and the registration of recurring, unclosed residue as present experience as the second phase. The paper aligns the model with predictive processing, the free-energy principle, active inference, triple-network theory, embodied cognition, theories of emotion, and higher-order theories of consciousness, while treating these frameworks as observation windows rather than one-to-one reductions. It also outlines testable predictions through aesthetic experiences such as the sublime, impermanence, and serenity, using subjective, behavioral, physiological, and neural indicators as convergent measures.