Consciousness debates often promote familiar capacities of human minds into necessary conditions while leaving the underlying organization unspecified. This paper proposes the Admissibility Theory of Consciousness (ATC): admissibility--the distinction between eligible and excluded continuations--as a candidate structural kernel around which consciousness-relevant organization develops. The claim is not that every constrained process experiences, but that sensing, meaning-binding, persistence, reflexivity, and situated agency can be investigated as different organizations of constrained continuation. Drawing on Dynatology, ATC distinguishes conceivable transitions, admissible transitions, and realized trajectories; separates physical feasibility, epistemic warrant, and authorization; and distinguishes context-sensitive behavior from alteration of the governing relation. Five organizational regimes connect elementary constraint to situated sensitivity, persistence, reflexive representation, and authorized self-authorship without imposing a scalar consciousness ranking. The Ableman Consciousness Ontology supplies multidimensional description; Semantic Reactor Theory supplies a proposed, inspectable architecture of epistemic positioning, governance, execution, and feedback; Meaning--Inertia remains an optional physical hypothesis. The paper locates these proposals within process philosophy, cybernetics, organizational closure, enactivism, and contemporary consciousness research. Its principal obligation is empirical discrimination: specifying which organizations of admissibility explain evidence beyond generic descriptions of lawful dynamics. Phenomenality remains an explicit bridge problem, not a property established by definition.
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Adam Ableman (2026) studied this question.
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