From Physical Comparison to Relational Appearance: A Defeasible Current-Act Account with Technical Supplement
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: When a person compares two apparent sizes, what warrants saying that their relation actually appears, and that the organised physical comparison itself bears that appearance? This two-document research contribution develops a positive, explicitly scoped answer. It distinguishes producing a correct comparison, experiencing a relation, and identifying the physical activity that bears the experience. Relational appearance means that qualitative counterparts are presented together with a relation or arrangement among them, rather than merely encoded, reported or inferred. The main paper, “From Physical Comparison to Relational Appearance: A Defeasible Current-Act Account,” combines two distinct warrants. Within a specified, materially continuing human visual-comparison setting, sensory calibration and appearance-directed evidence support a revisable inference to current relational presentation. A separately defended concrete-performance principle supports treating that qualitative presentation as a mode of the organised physical engagement itself. The argument permits the presentation to be newly constructed at current uptake; it does not require earlier sensory experiences or their subjects to merge. A worked retrospective application to an archived Ebbinghaus contextual-size experiment illustrates how these warrants combine and where they remain vulnerable. The paper separately examines serial appearances without joint presentation, an experienced field accompanying an automated answer, and an alternative that assigns qualitative instantiation to an exclusive experiential bearer. These alternatives challenge different premises and require different responses. The accompanying technical supplement develops the supporting proofs, models, counterexamples and empirical analyses. Topics include adequate-source descriptions and calibrated identification; occurrence, inclusion and ownership; common finalisation versus passive early marking; information and reconstruction limits; retention, reset and recurrence; exact native causal structures; spatial-response and realisation-identification diagnostics; and a conditional content-signature theorem specifying the distinctions required by a nominated content assignment. Further empirical discussions examine sensory construction, feature binding, dreaming and the separation of experienced action from bodily execution. A failed fixed neural prediction assay is reported alongside the conclusions it cannot support. The central contribution is a defeasible argument about actual current appearance and its physical attribution within a declared human sensory regime. The mathematics constrains descriptions and proposed connecting laws; it does not independently establish experience or its bearer. The constitutive conclusion depends on the defended philosophical principle and remains open to competing accounts. No new human or animal experiment is reported. The principal empirical application is retrospective, with prior archive exposure and no dedicated jointness or sensory-basing probes. The work establishes neither a universal law deriving consciousness from physical organisation nor a general machine-consciousness detector or an exact first-onset estimate. This record brings together the main paper and its companion technical supplement, both version 1.4, dated 16 October 2026. The main paper presents the central argument; the supplement provides its extended technical development, evidential qualifications and research tests.
Author: Rodgers, Jeremy
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7222746224
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