Consciousness Evidence and Causal Identification Protocol v1.1

This protocol defines a preregistered framework for comparing competing explanations of consciousness-relevant observations in biological and artificial systems. It is not a consciousness detector and does not assume that any tested system is phenomenally conscious. The protocol evaluates five core evidence domains: Behavioral (B), Structural (S), Metacognitive (M), Predictive (P), and Interventional (I), represented as Ecore = (B, S, M, P, I). Adversarial validation is treated separately as F = AdversarialValidate (B, S, M, P, I) and is applied across the core evidence domains. A central methodological distinction is maintained between observable reports Rₜ and phenomenal states Qₜ. The protocol explicitly assumes Rₜ ≠ Qₜ for purposes of measurement and does not treat behavioral or verbal reports as direct access to phenomenal experience. Competing hypotheses, including Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, the Amaya Higher-Dimensional Field Hypothesis, and specified non-conscious null models, are evaluated under common preregistered rules. No hypothesis receives evidentiary privilege and no winner is preregistered. The protocol requires out-of-sample prediction, causal intervention, adversarial controls, construct locking, analysis freezing, explicit stopping rules, transparent separation of confirmatory and exploratory analyses, and independent replication. The governing principle is that the protocol must be capable of proving the tested hypothesis wrong. The scientific claim supported by this protocol is deliberately bounded: the framework compares competing explanations of consciousness-relevant observations; it does not directly establish phenomenal consciousness.