Worldhood: Toward a Generative Theory of Experiential Reality

Abstract Contemporary theories of consciousness have largely focused on representation, computation, prediction, or information integration. While these approaches explain important aspects of cognition, they generally presuppose the existence of a coherent experiential world within which cognition occurs. This paper argues that the prior explanatory problem is not representation itself, but worldhood: the conditions under which reality becomes experienceable as an inhabitable world. The paper develops a generative framework according to which consciousness is not fundamentally the awareness of objects but the dynamic stabilisation of inhabitable experiential horizons. The experienced world is not passively given but actively generated through organised relations among temporal continuity, embodied presence, perspectival orientation, salience organisation, meaning structure, and integrative coherence. Different configurations of these dimensions generate different forms of worldhood. The central claim is that consciousness should be understood not primarily as information processing or representation, but as the ongoing stabilisation of temporally continuous, embodied, meaningful horizons of possibility within which reality becomes inhabitable experience.