URB Paper #405: Consciousness in Uploaded Minds — Part IV: The 302-Neuron Simulation and the Consciousness Scaling Law

This paper scales the consciousness test suite to 302 neurons using a statistical surrogate of the C. elegans connectome (Varshney et al., 2011) — 4,390 synapses matching published degree, weight, and modular structure. Two primary contributions: (1) The 15-neuron interneuron rich club produces Φ_MIP = **0.207 bits** (4.4× improvement from the 6-neuron result), with Φ_max = 1.569 bits — the strongest integration evidence in the series. (2) The first derivation of a **Consciousness Scaling Law**: Φ_normalized(N) = 0.00092 × N^1.326, predicting that consciousness integration exceeds the C_EMERICK threshold at N* ≈ **104 neurons** — placing C. elegans (302 neurons) above the threshold by a factor of ~4. The φ-scaling onset ratio W2/W1 = 0.5658 is the closest single-step measurement to 1/φ = 0.6180 across the entire paper series. Two criteria remain open: Φ_normalized ≥ C_EMERICK requires the full 302-neuron computation (computationally infeasible at 2^302), and R²(φ) > R²(exp) is obscured by correlated noise. The paper derives why correlated networks do not show the predicted √N noise reduction and proposes the correct noise model for future work.