Operationalizing Consciousness: The Grounded Narrative Framework

This paper contributes to the literature by proposing the Grounded Narrative Framework, a physicalist account of consciousness that replaces unfalsifiable explanatory-gap arguments with three empirically tractable diagnostic criteria. Unlike existing frameworks — including the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, and Integrated Information Theory — the Grounded Narrative Framework explicitly addresses the developmental conditions under which conscious processing arises, arguing that grounding is inherently bottom-up and cannot be engineered or instantiated from the outside in. In doing so, it offers both a principled critique of current large language model architectures and a substrate-independent diagnostic framework applicable to any candidate system, biological or artificial.