The Structural Necessity of Conscious Experience in Brain-Like Physical Systems

This work investigates whether reasoning is an optional enhancement of cognition or a structurally required process in any physically stable cognitive system. Using a constraint-driven global physical simulation framework, the study avoids predefined notions of reasoning, symbolic logic, language, or formal inference. Instead, reasoning is tested through eliminability: whether cognition, memory, prediction, and identity persistence can remain self-consistent when reasoning is suppressed. Across all admissible configurations, cognitive systems lacking reasoning exhibited predictive instability, identity degradation, or collapse of coherence. The results demonstrate that reasoning inevitably arises as a stabilizing process required to maintain cognition under realistic physical constraints, establishing reasoning as a fundamental structural feature of cognition rather than a contingent or optional capability.