Consciousness as Indexical Accessibility: A Closure-Based Framework

This paper proposes an architectural definition of consciousness grounded in two minimal structural commitments in philosophy of science: (i) the closure of universal description, and (ii) the distinction between ontology and accessibility. Rather than treating consciousness as a substance, property, or emergent object, the paper defines consciousness as a stable indexical accessibility structure within a closed domain of description. On this view, consciousness is not something contained in the world, but the condition under which the world remains locally accessible at all. The account is intentionally pre-theoretical and non-empirical. Its aim is to clarify what consciousness must be, given minimal constraints on universal description, rather than to explain how consciousness is implemented in particular biological or artificial systems. Several persistent foundational problems—including observer regress, the hard problem of consciousness, and debates over reduction—are shown to arise from category errors between architectural conditions and empirical content.