Active Self-Presence: Consciousness as a Temporally Extended Self-World Process — A Constitutive Unification Hypothesis

Active Self-Presence (ASP) proposes a constitutive unification hypothesis for consciousness. It identifies phenomenal consciousness with a temporally extended, recursively self-transforming self-world process organized through four relations: temporal self-transformation, self-world relation, differential continuation, and causal unity. Rather than treating mechanisms such as global broadcasting, recurrence, integration, prediction, higher-order representation, or embodied interaction as independently sufficient, ASP interprets them as partial causal projections of one continuing process. The paper develops intervention-based criteria for individuating that process, examines substrate neutrality and artificial systems, and compares ASP adversarially with major contemporary theories of consciousness. The proposed contribution is not a new isolated mechanism, but a candidate architecture for unifying multiple existing approaches within a single temporally extended constitutive framework.