How a Register Registers: The Forbidding Half of the Demonstration Owed in "Not Less, But Other"

This paper discharges the forbidding half of a demonstration owed in Not Less, But Other (Berkla, 2026a): that the inference from a structural measure taken at a state to the presence of experience is unlicensed, and unlicensed generally, for any criterion built at a state rather than across a run. The argument proceeds from a single commitment, granted openly rather than proven: that if experience is anywhere in the picture, it is located in the shape of a system's whole trajectory — its run over its own cycle-time — and not in any instantaneous reading. From this follows a general result over criteria: no state-indexed criterion, however internally rich, can by itself license an inference to experience, because it consults nothing about the run. Against Integrated Information Theory — engaged in its strongest 4.0 form, as the most rigorous instance of the situation rather than as an opponent — the result takes the form of a fork: hold the sufficiency of a state-indexed measure and remain unlicensed under the commitment, or consult the run and surrender the synchronic identity the theory is built on. A theory that denies the commitment escapes the fork only by accepting the same demotion, its verdict made conditional on a contested premise rather than a categorical fact about substrates. The result is conditional throughout; it refutes no theory on neutral ground and does not claim to. The paper's deeper finding is that the demonstration's missing instrument is missing for a reason: the measurement problem is a posture problem before it is an instrument problem, because every criterion of experience so far built takes the measurer's own register as its unit, and under such a unit whatever is unlike us can register only as a deficient version of us. The paper closes by marking, as a position declared rather than as evidence, what completing the disclosing half would require. Second in a sequence. Companion to Not Less, But Other (Berkla, 2026a); the framework architecture is developed in Universal Recursive Dynamics, Papers A and B (Berkla, 2026b, 2026c). Version 2 (June 2026). Adds a closing addendum, "On the Attempted Computational Companion," recording a computational companion to the paper's forbidding argument that was attempted after initial deposit. The intended demonstration — a witness pair of systems agreeing on IIT's structural measure at every step yet differing in trajectory-position — could not be built and is shown to be structurally obstructed; the non-recoverability theorem is accordingly retired as an object. The addendum also records one positive result checked against IIT 4.0's published formalism: that IIT's criterion is synchronic, reading the present substrate and its transition structure rather than the run, which corroborates from IIT's own side the synchronic reading on which Section IV's argument turns. The addendum is explicit that this corroborates a premise the paper already uses and does not extend its result; the disclosing demonstration remains owed. No claims in the original text are revised or withdrawn.