Contemporary theories of consciousness are necessarily developed from a narrow observational sample: human cognition and a limited range of biologically related minds. Yet features repeatedly observed within this restricted domain—including self-modeling, embodiment, recursive self-reference, centralized integration, and autocatalytic closure—are frequently elevated from empirical observations into presumed universal requirements for cognition itself. This paper introduces the concept of cognitive provincialism: the tendency to generalize local properties of observed minds into necessary properties of all possible minds. Through three diagnostic cases—the Borg Problem, African acacia signaling networks, and debates surrounding large language models—the paper argues that many contemporary discussions of consciousness evaluate unfamiliar systems according to their resemblance to human cognition rather than according to substrate-neutral organizational principles. As an alternative, the paper develops a framework centered on organizational primitives such as meaning-binding, continuation governance, constraint relevance, and admissibility relations. Within this framework, meaning is understood not primarily as a relationship between symbol and interpreter, but as a relationship between distinction and continuation: distinctions become meaningful when they alter the future possibilities available to a system. The objective is not to determine which systems are conscious, but to develop descriptive tools capable of investigating cognition across biological, artificial, collective, distributed, and hypothetical substrates. More broadly, the paper argues for a cartography of possible minds that remains open to forms of organization that may differ fundamentally from human cognition while still exhibiting meaningful, adaptive, and coherent behavior.
Adam Ableman Mazurk (2026) studied this question.