The Conscious Boundary of Choice: Functional Coupling, Phase-Relative Recruitment, and the Entry and Exit of Neural Content

This paper addresses a transition that is often left implicit: the difference between neural content that is locally represented, content that becomes part of the current conscious rendering, content whose recruitment changes a choice or action, and content that later exits active experience while remaining recoverable. It proposes a relation-based boundary defined by selective reciprocal coupling, task-specific phase compatibility, recurrence, receiver-relative novelty, inhibition, and causal access to a declared consequence. The release includes a corrected source genealogy, numbered equations, entry-choice-exit dissociation experiments, adverse cases, an executable hysteretic-boundary benchmark, regression tests, a bounded Lean formalization, and explicit failure conditions. The synthetic model distinguishes entry, choice, and exit under its declared generator and rejects simpler power-only, report-only, sensory-only, and nonhysteretic alternatives. The paper does not claim to settle metaphysical free will or establish a universal sufficient condition for consciousness.