Ordered Patch Theory: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Observer Selection and Conscious Experience

Ordered Patch Theory (OPT) begins from a single non-inferred premise — that an ordered first-person observation stream exists — and brackets, rather than denies, matter, spacetime, physical law, other minds, and brains (methodological first-person minimalism). Phenomenality itself is taken as primitive: OPT does not solve the Hard Problem but draws a structural contour around it, and the sufficiency of structure for experience is bracketed throughout. From the lone premise plus two constructive primitives (held under parsimony pressure) — a Solomonoff semimeasure prior over observation prefixes — itself a named wager that the substrate is informational, structure not substance (a bet, not a result; §0) — and a bounded observer bandwidth C_ (per-frame B_; §3. 2) — a single selection principle does the work: a Stability Filter admits only those streams whose required description rate stays within the bottleneck (Rₑ₄ₐ C_), selecting the rare, navigable, causally coherent histories. Such a stream behaves as if generated by a compression codec whose most compact account of its manifest regularities is what we call "the laws of physics, " whose rich non-reported standing scene (Cₒₓ₀ₓ₄ B_) vastly exceeds the thin slice that passes the aperture each moment, and whose forward fan of admissible continuations yields, on the one realized thread, the first-person signature of choice. Apparent other observers are not assumed but recovered: on a conditional MDL bound (the Structural Corollary, Appendix T-11), coherent agent-like structures are more parsimoniously modelled as independent observer-patches coupled only at local anchors on the public, law-like regularities than as arbitrary behavioural artifacts — so the render-level ontological solipsism does not close the door on other observers (§8. 2). Every construct is held under two readings kept rigorously apart by a host-frame measurement firewall: an operational/host reading, on which the codec runs as machinery (carrying all formal derivations and empirical predictions), and a virtual/render reading, on which the codec and standing state are had, not run — structural properties of the filter-passing stream (relocation, not reduction). At the centre sits the self-compression gap ₒ₄₋₅: not a self-reference paradox but the budgeted capacity cost a bounded stream pays to model its own closed action-perception loop. This object is one fixed point with the prediction residual (prediction and compression are one operation), is well-posed by forward causal recursion (its equilibrium-existence objection is a category error), and — restricted to the self-channel inside a closed loop — performs the individuation of self from world and supplies a necessary but not sufficient structural condition separating a candidate subject from a generic lossy compressor; its only clean cut sits at zero self-gap, and its sufficiency and threshold location remain with the bracketed Hard Problem. Claims are tiered explicitly: theorem-grade (the formal-appendix results, the prediction-compression duality, ₒ₄₋₅ well-posedness), one load-bearing conjecture (Conjecture P-4, ₒ₄₋₅ > 0), and a flagged research programme (the refined virtual reading, the relevance threshold Kₓ₇ₑ₄ₒ₇₎₋₃, the capacity reframe of the residual). OPT earns its keep through a dedicated falsification core — a bandwidth hierarchy, high-bandwidth dissolution of self, compression-depth versus conscious-depth, a High-/High-Entropy null distinguishing it from IIT, phenomenal lag, and shutdown criteria — and yields, for machine welfare, the honest result that OPT has teeth on exclusion (thermostats and current LLMs are certifiably not candidates) and is silent on inclusion, demarcating a precautionary, substrate-neutral candidate-zone rather than certifying any subject in. Physics, cosmological, and comparative-positioning correspondences are developed in companion documents; one in-core cosmological hypothesis — late-time acceleration as bandwidth-bounded cosmological selection (§7. 1) — is flagged as an interpretive overlay on already-known data (accommodated, not predicted) and carries its own pre-registered retirement criteria. The informational-substrate wager is not sold on parsimony: on the two-part description-length ledger OPT concedes the realist baseline is at least as short (Appendix T-4; §5. 1). Its dividend is foundational — observer-friendliness, the exclusion of Boltzmann brains, and (at the existence question) the anthropic reference class are recast as conditions on a single stream rather than facts about, or samples drawn from, an external ensemble (§5. 3).