Consciousness as Retrospective Narrative: Social Protocols, Reason, and the Dissolution of the Self–Other Boundary

This record contains the English and Japanese versions of the same conceptual essay. The paper reconsiders human consciousness and subjective experience not as mysterious entities located within the individual, but as retrospective narrative protocols formed to reduce social conflict and maintain communal continuity. The paper defines consciousness as a retrospective narrative that integrates actions after the fact, analyzes manners, etiquette, and controlled deception as conflict-avoidance protocols, and repositions reason as a narrative control mechanism that delays and redescribes short-term egoistic responses. It further introduces the dissolution of the self–other boundary as a structure through which affection, family, community, labor, faith, nation, and fandom incorporate the states and futures of others into the self-model. The paper also discusses trust as an environmental model relearned through predictable safety, the re-hardening of the self–other boundary after betrayal, different forms of contribution within communal future models, and modern labor systems as cases in which social protocols may become devices of institutional domination. Finally, it repositions AI consciousness debates by asking not whether AI contains the same inner domain as humans, but under what conditions a being is narratively integrated as a social subject. The Japanese file is included as a parallel-language version of the same work, not as a separate publication. 本レコードには、同一論文の英語版および日本語版を収録している。日本語版は別論文ではなく、同一内容の並行言語版として含まれている。