The Conservation Demarcation: Separating World from Cognition by Conservation Law

We observe the world only through cognition, yet the world and cognition are ontologically distinct.This generates a demarcation problem: which elements of our picture of reality belong to the world, andwhich are contributed by cognition? We propose that the presence of a conservation law provides aprincipled, binary criterion. If the world is accessible only through cognition, then identifying theworld's contribution requires varying the cognitive frame and finding what remains invariant. Noether'stheorem formalizes this operation: conserved quantities — those associated with continuous symmetries— are invariant under frame variation and therefore world-side. Quantities without conservation lawsare cognition-side. Path dependence is the cognition-side diagnostic: without an invariance condition tofix their values, unconserved quantities vary with the cognitive path taken. The criterion re-establishesRussell's (1913) causal eliminativism on independent grounds — there is no conserved causal charge —and inverts the Dowe–Salmon conserved-quantity theory of causation: the conserved quantities areworld-side, but the causal label constructed from them is not. Theory underdetermination is reframed asa structural consequence of mapping a conserved domain onto an unconserved one. The scope of thecriterion is restricted to classical mechanics and quantum mechanics, where conservation laws arewell-defined and empirically testable; at cosmological scales, the required symmetries are absent andthe criterion's input is unavailable. Open problems include the extension to dissipative systems, thestatus of information under unitarity, and the dynamics of cognition-to-world interference.