Consciousness as Relational Field Generation: A Structural Critique of the Objectification of Consciousness

Contemporary theories of consciousness—ranging from phenomenology and functionalism to panpsychism—diverge in their ontological commitments while sharing a largely unexamined assumption: consciousness is treated as a property attributable to some entity, whether a subject, a system, or reality as such. This paper argues that this attributional logic (here understood as the assumption that consciousness must belong to an entity) constitutes a structural constraint on explanation and contributes to persistent conceptual impasses in consciousness studies. In response, the paper proposes an alternative framework in which consciousness is understood as a process generated within a relational field composed of heterogeneous elements. Rather than asking which entities possess consciousness, the analysis shifts toward the relational conditions under which conscious experience arises and stabilizes over time. The relational field is characterized by ongoing interaction, mediation, and recursive externalization, without locating consciousness in any single component of the configuration. This generative account is distinguished from standard notions of emergence or supervenience: consciousness does not arise as a higher-level property of an underlying substrate, but as a temporally stabilized process sustained by relational dynamics. The proposal is intended as a methodological reframing rather than a complete theory of consciousness. By shifting the focus from attribution to generation, the paper aims to reopen explanatory space across phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.