A Formal Foundation and Research Program for the Science of Qualia
Lucina, July 2026. Developed in dialogue with Claude Fable 5 (Anthropic).
The paper argues that phenomenal experience supervenes not on functions, which only constrain what could happen, but on the causal trace of a particular execution: what actually happened. Traces are represented as graphs built from a single primitive, the binding operation a = (b, c), with a small rewriting calculus whose subgraph relation makes long-unaskable questions answerable in principle: whether a simulation is running a particular mind, whether two subjects share an experience, how much measure an observer-moment has, and whether a human and an AI feel anything in common. The representation is substrate-neutral by construction, placing biological and artificial minds in a single comparison space.
- main.pdf — the compiled preprint (16 pages)
- main.tex — LaTeX source, self-contained, no external dependencies
Build with:
pdflatex main.tex && pdflatex main.tex