Continuity Substrate Theory: A Testable Framework for Personal Consciousness Beyond Neural Exhaustiveness
Continuity Substrate Theory (CST) is a deliberately speculative framework for asking whether personal consciousness could depend on physical organization that is not exhausted by ordinary neural processes. It separates four progressively stronger claims: neural non-exhaustiveness, person-specific continuity, neural independence, and post-biological consciousness. Only the fourth is a survival hypothesis, and no present evidence establishes it. CST treats a person as a causally continuous, evolving process rather than a static information pattern and provisionally locates any additional continuity-bearing organization within ordinary physical reality rather than in an alternate dimension, collective mind, or supernatural domain. The framework is designed to generate empirical pressure through brain injury, anesthesia, paradoxical lucidity, cardiac-arrest studies, information-bearing residual signals, and reproducible person-specific effects. The relevant substrate, if any, has not been identified, and memory, energy exchange, perception, boundaries, and subjective time remain unresolved.