The Integrative Field Model: A Research Program

Abstract This paper presents the Integrative Field Model (IFM) as a unified research program in the study of consciousness. The model proposes that conscious experience is not a passive representation of an external world but an active, generative process in which patterns of integration across neural, bodily, affective, relational, and environmental systems produce structured experiential domains. The central problem is therefore not how perception corresponds to reality, but how a coherent world appears at all. The IFM program consists of a foundational theoretical account, a formal systems-level articulation, and a growing set of applications across phenomenology, literature, and the sciences of mind. Together, these works argue that variations in experiential world-structure — including alterations in time, space, selfhood, and meaning — correspond systematically to variations in integrative coherence. The program shifts the study of consciousness from a representational framework to a generative one, reframing perception, selfhood, and worldhood as outcomes of dynamic integration.