Adversarial Validation Protocol for Consciousness Evidence v1.1

The Adversarial Validation Protocol for Consciousness Evidence v1.1 is a preregistered methodological framework for evaluating consciousness-related evidence in artificial systems. It is designed to distinguish observable behavioral evidence from claims concerning phenomenal states while preventing any target hypothesis from receiving evidentiary privilege over competing explanations. The protocol specifies four principal validation pillars: (1) confound and alternative-mechanism isolation, (2) algorithmic red-teaming, (3) blinded countermodel evaluation, and (4) preregistered falsification criteria. Depending on the registered implementation, these pillars may incorporate held-out predictive testing, model comparison, information criteria, explanatory-gain testing, operational description-length analysis, evidence-ratio methods, multiplicity controls, and independent replication. The governing methodological principle is that no hypothesis receives evidentiary privilege. A consciousness-related hypothesis must therefore be capable of empirical failure under conditions specified before confirmatory analysis. The protocol explicitly preserves the distinction: R_t ≠ Q_t where R_t denotes observable reports or behavioral outputs and Q_t denotes a hypothesized phenomenal state. Observable reports are not treated as direct measurements of phenomenal experience. The protocol also preserves the following epistemic constraints: Evidence Strength ≠ Truth Probability Model Superiority ≠ Truth Predictive Success ≠ Phenomenal Consciousness ¬Reject(H_C) ≠ Accept(H_C) A favorable result is therefore interpreted only as conditional comparative support: the specified target model performed better than specified countermodels under the preregistered conditions and criteria. Such a result does not establish the truth of the target model and does not establish phenomenal consciousness. The protocol requires transparent reporting of positive findings, null findings, adverse findings, protocol failures, deviations, and unsuccessful replications. The accompanying implementation materials are intended to permit independent execution of specified protocol components without private access to the author. Paper 11 functions as the adversarial-validation layer of the Amaya Consciousness Research Program and extends the evidence-classification and causal-identification architecture developed in Papers 9 and 10. The framework does not establish that any artificial system is conscious, sentient, phenomenally aware, a person, or morally considerable. Its purpose is methodological: to improve discrimination among competing explanations of observed artificial-system behavior while maintaining a strict epistemic boundary between behavioral evidence and claims about phenomenal consciousness.