Event Horizons, Spacetime Geometry, and the Limits of Integrated Consciousness

TL;DR

This paper explores how unified conscious experiences, modeled by integration-based theories, cannot span black hole event horizons due to causal disconnection, leading to a bifurcation of consciousness into separate fields.

Contribution

It demonstrates that integration-based theories of consciousness cannot maintain a single unified field across an event horizon, revealing a fundamental link between spacetime structure and consciousness.

Findings

No strongly connected component can span an event horizon.

Unified consciousness bifurcates into separate fields at the horizon.

The number and boundaries of conscious fields depend on spacetime causal structure.

Abstract

What happens to a unified conscious field when its physical implementation straddles a black hole event horizon? This paper addresses that question for integration-based theories, including Integrated Information Theory, Global Workspace Theory, and Predictive Processing. These views share a structural commitment: unity requires a single strongly connected component (SCC) in an effective causal graph over a finite integration window $\tau$. Using the standard black hole causal structure, I show that no SCC can span an event horizon. Any theory that ties unity to strong connectivity must therefore accept that a single conscious field cannot remain numerically identical and unified across such a configuration. From the perspective of the theories themselves, the outcome is bifurcation: each causally connected subsystem continues to satisfy the very structural criteria the theory declared necessary for a unified field. On any such view, the number and boundaries of unified conscious fields are therefore fixed not by the substrate alone but by the conjunction of its internal architecture with the relativistic causal structure of the spacetime it occupies, a dependency that ordinary spacetime conceals by supplying it so abundantly, but which an event horizon abruptly withdraws.