Six Theories Quietly Agree On What Consciousness IS

Six prominent theories of consciousness (HOT, GWT, IIT, RPT, PP, AST) disagree about the mechanism that produces consciousness and agree on what they import to operate as theories of consciousness at all. Reading the six theories in three registers, what each explicitly claims, what each has to deploy to make any of its claims operate, and what each has to deliver to count as a theory of consciousness, surfaces seven shared imports no theory can operate without, substrate, mechanism, temporal dynamics, a subject-and-agency side, semantic capacity, phenomenological character, and bounded unity. The subject-and-agency import has a sharper structure than the other six. The side that undergoes experience and the side that selects which contents become conscious occupy the same architectural slot in every theory the paper reads, a structural identification this paper calls the endomorphic ownership of experience. The explicit register is partial. The deployed register is uniform. The success-condition register is uncontestable by the six programs themselves. A theory denying its target has changed subject from consciousness to something else. The convergence at the deployed-import register is a working necessity each theory imported to predict consciousness in any specific system, and is evidence about what the field has stipulated as its target. **Keywords:** consciousness, theories of consciousness, higher-order theory, global workspace theory, integrated information theory, recurrent processing theory, predictive processing, attention schema theory, illusionism, explanandum, hard problem of consciousness, deployed-register convergence, three-register read, endomorphic ownership of experience