System-Derivation Ontology - A Formal Category for Consciousness Studies

Major theoretical programs in consciousness studies disagree about what consciousness is while tacitly agreeing on whose consciousness is at issue. The system whose integration is measured, whose workspace is mapped, whose free energy is minimized is presupposed by each framework, not derived within it. This agreement is not benign: it fixes the referent of every downstream claim, constrains what counts as an explanation, and thereby determines which questions can be asked, which answers can count as valid, and which disagreements can be meaningfully adjudicated. This paper argues that every major consciousness framework contains a binding point at which a system must already be specified for its formalism to apply, and that this binding point is not eliminable from within the framework — the dependence is ontological, not methodological. The paper introduces System-Derivation Ontology (SDO) as the formal category for theories that operate at the level where systemhood itself is determined, requiring derivation of persistence-capable boundaries under perturbation as endogenously maintained units rather than identification of boundaries in systems whose separability is already given. The category is distinguished from adjacent positions — panprotopsychism, Russellian monism, and the autonomy tradition — with which it is liable to be conflated. Existing consciousness frameworks are placed as operating at a different explanatory level than SDO: Integrated Information Theory measures integration of an already individuated system, Global Workspace Theory describes coordination within an already individuated system, and the Free Energy Principle describes maintenance strategies available to an already individuated system. These placements are not competitive reclassifications but dependency placements. System-based frameworks are conditional on a prior individuation decision; SDO names the class of theories that render that decision derivable rather than assumed.