Beyond foundational consciousness models: The Beral layer as a mediating structure and an irreversible three-stage model of qualia generation

Recent theoretical approaches have renewed attention to the idea that consciousness should be understood not as a by-product of physical processes but as a foundational aspect of reality itself. Panpsychism, foundational consciousness models, and related field-theoretic approaches share a common commitment to treating consciousness as cosmologic fundamental rather than an emergent one. However, many of these theories lack an explicit structural account of how concrete, private experience is generated from a non-dual foundation. This paper aims to address this gap by presenting an internal generative architecture that completes foundational consciousness approaches without rejecting their core premises. Instead of treating experience generation as a single continuous mapping, we introduce a three-layer structural model consisting of concordance potential, the Beral layer, and the phenomenal domain. The central contribution of this study lies in defining the Beral layer as a transparent mediating layer that generates neither meaning nor subjectivity, yet it enables experiential differentiation between the foundational and phenomenal levels. Furthermore, we argue that experience is generated through an irreversible three-stage structure consisting of (1) establishment of experience, (2) qualia formation, and (3) qualia acquisition. This distinction clarifies that qualitative properties of experience (qualia) can be generated prior to their attribution to a subject and that subjectivity or selfhood is not the cause of experience but emerges retroactively through the process of experiential acquisition. The proposed three-stage model provides a structural explanation for why artificial systems cannot acquire qualia, not in terms of insufficient capability or complexity but in terms of fundamental structural differences. In addition, by introducing the concept of Kamae as a pre-observational condition that precedes observation and meaning attribution, the framework explains how different experiences can arise from identical foundational states without reducing such variation to subjective arbitrariness. While this study supports approaches that regard consciousness as foundational, it is simultaneously critical of them. Rather than asserting that “consciousness is fundamental,” the focus is placed on the structural question of how experience is generated from a foundation. By introducing the Beral layer and the irreversible three-stage model, this paper offers a generative framework that describes experiential differentiation while preserving non-duality and proposes a coherent completion of generative approaches in consciousness studies.