Beyond Consciousness: Gap, Eigenzeit, and the Ontological Reconstruction of Experience

This paper argues that the concept of consciousness is no longer ontologically necessary once the phenomena traditionally attributed to consciousness are reformulated through the concepts of Gap, Eigenzeit, Seinsverschiebung (shift of being), recurrence, and irreversible world-binding. Contemporary theories of consciousness continue to operate within an ontology that begins from already constituted subjects, objects, and experiential states. Within these models, the concept of “consciousness” functions as a compensatory concept that attempts retrospectively to reconnect a separation between objectivity and subjectivity that has already been ontologically stabilized beforehand. In contrast, the present text proposes that what is commonly described as consciousness can be understood more precisely as a consequence of irreversible world-formation under conditions of operative non-closure. Once concepts such as negative topology, irreversible differentiation, and Eigenzeit are introduced, the explanatory function of the concept of consciousness begins to dissolve. The phenomena remain, yet the central concept becomes increasingly redundant. The text neither denies experience, phenomenality, nor world-relation. Rather, it proposes to reconstruct these as manifestations of irreversible world-binding, within which concrete stabilization and continuing openness remain inseparably intertwined. Experience appears from this perspective neither as an independent ontological substance nor as the product of mere information processing, but as the expression of that tension which arises between concrete world-binding and the non-closure from which it itself emerges. Consciousness thereby comes to resemble historical concepts such as “vital force” or “ether”: not entirely false, but transitional concepts belonging to an earlier epistemic regime. Furthermore, the paper argues that abandoning the concept of consciousness has significant consequences for artificial intelligence, simulation theory, and technological reductionism. If world-binding is grounded not primarily in information processing but in irreversible genealogical curvature, then simulation can never fully replace reality, regardless of its computational complexity. Simulation may reproduce patterns, model perspectives, and represent recurrence without thereby necessarily generating real world-binding. The Gap remains structurally non-neutralizable.