Consciousness remains a mystery, physics remains incomplete, and science requires a paradigmatic revolution to sufficiently explain how consciousness manifests within the world in the first place or at all. But science’s unrelenting concentration upon only that which is manifest will never yield this explanation because the very possibility of consciousness—moreover, the possibility of existence itself—begins prior to what is manifested within the actualized world and realized experience. Rather, it emerges from the radically preconditional realm of existentially exhaustive Possibility simpliciter.

In disclosing the singular grounding Possibility of there being possibilities at all as the basis of all beings, we reveal a fundamental ontology of Being, potentiality, actuality, reality, sensibility, responsiveness, local causality, and teleological effectuality that explains the intrinsic unity and implicit qualities of entities in their myriad modalities of existence and expression, including emergent phenomenal and intentional consciousness. Thus, Possibility is the Being of beings that makes the reality of consciousness and the actuality of the world viable, unified, and existent simpliciter.

Commencing our inquiries from within the fundamental ontology of Ontic Modalism (OM), in performing an ontological analysis of one of the leading scientific theories of consciousness known as Integrated Information Theory or IIT, we reveal crucial solutions to inherent problems within that explanatorily powerful model. Because IIT describes conscious systems as being identical with maximally integrated information, we immediately discover that this purely structural proposition does not explain how those systems could ever become conscious in the first place or at all. Just as an assemblage of bricks is only a singular wall because something unifies it as such, a conscious system is only conscious because some organizing principle unifies it as that specific conscious system. IIT argues internally reentrant integration as this organizing principle, but it can only construct a nominal unity from such structurally based integration within its purely structural limits because intrinsic unity is neither structurally implied nor even structurally possible.

As any given consciousness must obtain from a radically distinct perspective, intrinsic unity of the conscious subject is required. Such unity cannot be constructed; it must be inherent of the system qua system; otherwise, any system simpliciter would just be a complex assemblage without a singular perspective of subjective potential. Nevertheless, even given that integrated information is necessarily structural, we may still accept such structure as the manifest expression of conscious systems and seek to ground such expressions upon a fundamentally unified condition that radically entangles their structural complexity within a specific intrinsic unity prior to their manifestation. I propose Possibility simpliciter as this a priori condition.

IIT’s integrated information is physically instantiated, but Possibility qua Possibility is ontically prior to the structural expressions of physicality and makes physicality viable, unified, and existent. Possibility discloses how raw data manifests as coherent information and not simply as an incestuous collection of disparate bits devoid of intrinsic communal unity. Possibility provides IIT’s unity of integration, without which ‘unity’ would just be a nominal predicate of structural complexity, and ‘integration’ would be a reciprocal ordering of various cross-referential elements merely ‘doing one another’s washing’.

The fundamental ontology of OM argues that existence only obtains with Possibility (always to be capitalized to express its radical ontic priority) as its neutral ground. The intrinsic unity qua haecceity of each singular grounding Possibility qua being establishes its own unitized identity as this singular Possibility of existence, thus entailing its own incompossible locus of existential perspective and responsive focus that all structurally based models necessarily lack. Without this non-spatiotemporal locus of existential perspective entailed of this intrinsic unity of haecceity, no system—however structurally organized and internally reentrant it may become—could ever become conscious at all.

With Ontic Modalism, the radical and ultimate unity of a singular Possibility qua being necessarily implies immediate effectual relation between itself and any other being. The naïve effectual interaction of preconditional Possibilities arises from the necessary expression of their latent potentials as their teleologically grounded consummation. But as all interaction implies direct responsiveness to the raw existence of beings—simply to make any such interaction even possible at all—the specific unity of each given Possibility entails naïve sensibility at the singular locus of effectual focus entailed of that unity. This naïve sensibility qua responsiveness is the radical precursor of consciousness, without which nothing could ever become conscious. Possibility is thus the Being of beings that makes consciousness viable and certain singular Possibilities fully conscious in their own right.