Consciousness on Epistemic Ground

This essay develops a conceptual framework intended to clarify the necessary structural conditions for consciousness. The argument begins by revisiting the original epistemic meaning of subjectivity in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In this sense, subjectivity refers not to phenomenal experience but to the structural conditions under which a system can encounter a world from a first-person perspective. Building on this interpretation, the paper argues that such an epistemic structure is biologically instantiated in all living systems. A primitive self-maintaining organism, bounded from its environment by a membrane and engaged in continuous cycles of action, sensing, and evaluation, already constitutes a minimal subject in this epistemic sense. Subjectivity then is the epistemic perspective of such a self-maintaining system, and the base from which consciousness later evolves. From this starting point, the essay develops a distinction between first-order biological subjectivity and the additional organisational structures required for conscious experience, including a second-order epistemic structure. Consciousness is analysed as emerging when neural systems make representations of the organism’s own internal states available as content within an integrating dynamic memory. Conscious attention is suggested as a function for prioritisation and resolving uncertainty, giving distributed subsystems a common focus. Within this framework, several influential approaches in contemporary consciousness research — including enactivism and affective theories, global workspace, active inference and self-model theory — can be interpreted as addressing different components of a shared biological and epistemic architecture rather than competing explanations of the same phenomenon.