Before We Ask About Consciousness

Before We Ask About Consciousness defines a strict admissibility gate for claims about consciousness understood as subjecthood, that is, the existence of an owned, time-ordered, persisting subject rather than a collection of physical states, functional processes, behaviors, or reports. The work does not propose a theory of consciousness, does not introduce a mechanism for persistence, and does not advance a solution to survival, revival, or post-biological continuity. Its purpose is methodological and classificatory: to specify the minimal conditions under which a statement may legitimately count as a subject-level consciousness claim. Under this framework, a claim is admissible only if it explicitly identifies a single causal trajectory with a defined system boundary and time interval, specifies an internal reference and ownership mapping by which experiences are marked as “mine” from within the trajectory, and states a continuity condition requiring stepwise causal dependence without gaps, branching, or stop–copy–restart semantics. Claims that rely solely on similarity, memory matching, behavioral equivalence, functional organization, or post-hoc reconstruction are classified as category errors unless an explicit continuity-preserving bridge is provided. The framework is intentionally conservative. It separates correlates of experience from claims about a persisting subject, prevents conceptual drift between states, processes, and selves, and clarifies the burden of proof in debates spanning neuroscience, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind, and discussions of death, persistence, and revival. Assertions of “impossible in principle” are treated as no-go claims that require explicit physics-level barriers rather than definitional, intuitive, or rhetorical closure. AI-assisted editing was used for language refinement and clarity only. All concepts, structure, and claims are the author’s own.