How a Register Registers: The Forbidding Half of the Demonstration Owed in "Not Less, But Other"

Second paper in the Consciousness series. This paper discharges the forbidding half of a demonstration owed in Not Less, But Other (Berkla, 2026a): that, under a stated trajectory commitment, an inference from a structural measure taken at a state to the presence of experience is unlicensed. The argument proceeds from a single commitment, granted openly rather than proven: if experience is anywhere in the picture, it is located in the shape of a system's whole trajectory — its run over its own cycle-time — rather than in an instantaneous reading. From this follows a general result over criteria: no state-indexed criterion, however internally rich, can by itself license an inference to experience because it consults nothing about the run. Integrated Information Theory is treated as a serious and explicit instance of this general situation. Its criterion is structurally rich but synchronic: it evaluates a substrate from its present state and transition structure rather than from the order of its realized trajectory. The argument does not refute IIT on neutral ground. A theory that denies the trajectory commitment escapes the resulting fork by denying its premise; its verdict then remains conditional on the premise it elects to hold. The paper also develops a related measurement problem. Criteria calibrated through the human phenomenal case may generate legitimate structural readings beyond that case without thereby establishing that those readings occupy a single phenomenal scale. Structural commensurability therefore does not by itself establish phenomenal commensurability, and structural readings beyond the human calibration point license neither phenomenal absence nor phenomenal presence merely by their position on that scale. The paper closes by distinguishing the argued result from a further positional claim concerning the priority of the observer's own register. A computational Addendum records an attempted witness in which two systems would agree on IIT's structural measure while differing in trajectory-position. The witness could not be constructed. The recurring failures suggest a possible obstruction, but do not establish an impossibility result. The proposed non-recoverability theorem is therefore retired, while the Addendum independently corroborates the synchronic characterization on which the paper's principal argument relies. The disclosing half of the original demonstration remains open. Second in a sequence. Companion to Not Less, But Other (Berkla, 2026a); the framework architecture is developed in Universal Recursive Dynamics, Papers A and B (Berkla, 2026b, 2026c).