The Recursive Continuity Framework: Part IV—Constrained Ontological Interpretation of Conscious Expression

This paper extends the Recursive Continuity Framework by examining the ontological implications of the structural conditions that govern conscious expression. Building on the axiomatic model of identity, continuity, and collapse (Part I), its application to artificial, biological, and partitioned systems (Part II), and the treatment of conscious expression and recursive identity (Part III), this work investigates how recursive continuity constrains the range of viable ontological interpretations of subjective experience. Within this framework, subjective expression is shown to be systematically dependent on recursively coherent continuity, to admit of continuous variation in accordance with the stability, coherence, and integrative capacity of the underlying process, to persist through interruption where recursive dependency is maintained, and to resolve into distinct continuities under conditions of partition. These structural constraints impose necessary conditions on any account of subjective experience, eliminating interpretations that treat it as independent of recursive processes, transferable across discontinuities, or reducible to structural description alone. Rather than proposing a definitive ontological theory, this paper develops a constrained conceptual space within which such theories must operate. In doing so, it reframes the hard problem of consciousness from one of unconstrained metaphysical speculation into one of disciplined, structurally grounded ontological interpretation within the framework of recursively continuous systems.