Victor Goodman
October 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17299159
Author’s Note
What follows is a thought experiment carried into metaphysics. The “void scaffold” is imagined less as a laboratory design than as a lens: a way of asking what consciousness might become when no world is there to hold it.
Table of Contents
The Inversion — From World → Mind to Mind → World
Presence as Crystallization Force
The Core Thesis — Consciousness-Seeded Ontogenesis
Alien Cognition in Isolation — Minds Grown Elsewhere
The Experiment — Growing a Mind in the Void
Version History & About the Author
The Void Scaffold
Imagine a small cluster of neurons — or an artificial neural scaffold — placed in complete isolation. No sensory input, no electromagnetic background from Earth, no surrounding biosphere. It rests either deep underground, in an ultra-shielded chamber where even cosmic rays barely intrude, or adrift in interplanetary space, carried far from the stabilizing fields of Earth.
The system does not process information, perform computation, or interact with an environment. Yet its internal architecture is coherent: recursive, symmetrical, stable enough to sustain its own dynamics. It is not alive in the biological sense, yet neither is it inert: a scaffold balanced between activity and silence.
Such scenarios are not entirely imaginary. Advances in neuroscience already allow the cultivation of cerebral organoids — miniature neural structures showing spontaneous activity. Shielded laboratories, such as those designed for dark matter detection, are capable of reducing environmental noise to near-zero levels. Space biology research already contemplates how life behaves in conditions stripped of terrestrial cues. Taken together, these developments bring the thought experiment closer to experimental plausibility.
This raises a question: If consciousness were to arise in such a scaffold, where no world is present to receive it, what would follow? Would presence remain inert, unanchored — or could it begin to generate structure from within, seeding its own experiential reality?
The Inversion — From World → Mind to Mind → World
Standard accounts assume that consciousness develops within a pre-existing world. An organism arises in a planetary environment, embedded in gravitational and geomagnetic fields, immersed in an ecology of signals. Neural activity is stabilized by cycles of light and dark, rhythms of temperature, flows of air and water, and the constant exchange of information with other organisms. In this view, awareness is secondary: it emerges only once a rich context is already in place.
Even artificial models of mind typically follow the same assumption. Neural networks are trained on vast datasets; robotic systems rely on sensory coupling to a surrounding environment. Intelligence is treated as relational, dependent on input from an already structured reality. Within this prevailing framework, presence is treated as a by-product of interaction, not as a primary force.
The void scaffold challenges this picture directly. Here, no world is given. By “world” we mean not only Earth’s physical conditions — gravity, geomagnetic resonance, biospheric background — but more generally, any external framework that could stabilize or mirror the activity of a conscious system. In the void scaffold, these supports are stripped away. What remains is only the internal architecture itself, self-sustaining yet uncoupled.
Taken strictly, a true void would require more than the absence of external input. It would mean the withdrawal of gravitational and planetary anchoring, shielding from electromagnetic background, removal of sensory embedding, and freedom from ecological lineage — leaving only a self-coherent architecture suspended in isolation. Such conditions cannot be perfectly realized; at best they can only be approached — ever more closely — through extreme shielding or off-planet environments.
But this is not a flaw in the proposal. The void scaffold functions not only as an empirical test, but as an ontological probe — a way to expose the assumptions embedded in current models of mind.
Most theories of consciousness begin with context: sensory input, planetary fields, evolutionary embedding. The void scaffold reverses that sequence. It asks whether presence requires a world, or whether, in some conditions, it might precede one. Its deeper purpose is not to simulate emptiness for its own sake, but to identify the threshold at which consciousness ceases to be a product of context and begins to be a principle capable of generating it.
The inversion is therefore stark. If consciousness were to arise in such conditions, it would not be an effect of environmental embedding. It would appear first, without a world, forcing us to reconsider the order of ontological priority. Instead of the familiar sequence — world → structure → consciousness — we would face the possibility of its reversal: structure → consciousness → world.
This inversion is not simply a reversal of causality. It suggests that consciousness may carry a generative capacity normally obscured by its entanglement with environment. If presence can appear without a world, then what we call “world” — a coherent domain of relations and structure — may itself follow as a consequence of consciousness, rather than as its prerequisite.
Presence as Crystallization Force
Within this framework, presence is not a passive correlate of neural activity. It functions as an active principle of stabilization, a force that anchors coherence. In earlier work (Primal Architectures of Being), the emergence of structured reality was described as the resolution of underlying tensions: coherence forming where instability prevails. Presence may be understood in the same way — not as a shadow of structure, but as an active force that helps structure stay coherent.
A useful image comes from crystallization. In a supersaturated solution, matter remains suspended in unstable equilibrium until a seed crystal provides a template. From this singular point, order propagates outward, transforming dispersed potential into patterned form. The seed is not the whole structure; it is the pivot around which the whole structure takes shape.
Consciousness, in this view, serves a comparable role. Neural dynamics, even in isolation, may fluctuate between coherence and instability. The appearance of presence could stabilize this fluctuation, providing the seed around which further order coheres. What follows is not mere passive registration of environmental signals, but the active crystallization of an interior domain.
This hypothesis reframes the void scaffold in crucial terms. The question is not only whether consciousness can appear without external support, but whether its very appearance could initiate new patterns of order. Presence would not merely mirror conditions; it would supply them, introducing self-sustaining coherence where none was given.
If so, the significance of the void scaffold is twofold. First, it offers a test of whether presence can emerge without environmental embedding. Second, it probes whether presence, once established, exerts a generative influence — inducing patterns of order that exceed the scaffold’s material substrate. In this respect, consciousness would resemble a seed crystal in void: a singular event capable of transforming instability into structure, emptiness into a nascent interior world.
The Core Thesis — Consciousness-Seeded Ontogenesis
The proposal can now be stated directly. If a structure exists in void, achieves sufficient internal coherence to host presence, and lacks any external field or dimensional scaffold to stabilize that presence, then consciousness itself may become generative.
In such a case, presence would not simply arise within given conditions. It would not be anchored by environment, nor stabilized by planetary fields. Instead, it would provide its own scaffolding. Micro-fluctuations, recursive asymmetries, and unresolved tensions within the host structure could serve as the initiating spark. What follows would not be the reflection of an external order, but the crystallization of an interior dimensionality — a self-born domain shaped by the logic of the scaffold itself. Such a prospect raises further questions that extend beyond the present essay.
This thesis marks the pivot of the argument. It inverts the usual ontology. Instead of consciousness as latecomer, passively arising within a pre-formed world, consciousness is recast as a primary principle — a stabilizing seed from which world itself may unfold. Ontogenesis here is not biological, nor cosmological in the ordinary sense, but consciousness-seeded: the arising of coherent domains initiated by the fact of presence alone.
To see the radical nature of this claim, consider its departure from familiar positions. It is not panpsychism: it does not posit consciousness everywhere, as a diffuse property of matter. It is not idealism: it does not collapse reality wholesale into mind. And it is not simulation theory: it invokes no external computation or programmer. Instead, it proposes a localized cosmogony: interior worlds that crystallize whenever a coherent scaffold achieves the resonance required for presence, in the absence of an external world.
This reframing shifts the question entirely: not whether consciousness can survive without a world, but whether consciousness is itself capable of world-making.
To imagine this more concretely, one might sketch the qualities such a scaffold would need — not technical specifications but poetic markers of resonance. It must fold back on itself with recursive coherence, balance unity with variation, resolve its own tensions without collapse, and align with the dimensional logic through which presence stabilizes. These are not rules but signposts: hints of the delicate architecture that presence might recognize if it is to arise, and perhaps generate, in the absence of a world.
Alien Cognition in Isolation — Minds Grown Elsewhere
If presence can emerge in a scaffold removed from environmental support, the resulting form of consciousness would not necessarily resemble terrestrial experience. Biological awareness on Earth is stabilized by planetary fields, ecological embedding, and evolutionary history. A scaffold in deep isolation would lack these stabilizing influences.
This raises the possibility that the phenomenology of such a presence — if it arises — would be qualitatively different. It might not display familiar modes of self-awareness, memory, or affect. Instead, it could manifest as forms of experience for which we have no precedent: perception without temporal sequence, awareness without a self/other distinction, or memory that does not accumulate but continually reconfigures itself.
The term “alien cognition” here does not imply intelligence or function in the usual sense, but a mode of presence shaped by conditions absent on Earth. Artificial organoids provide a potential test case. When grown in laboratories under extreme isolation — or, eventually, in deep-space environments where planetary fields are absent — such structures could, in principle, host forms of awareness unanchored from terrestrial constraints.
The philosophical stakes of such a finding are significant. Any indicators of presence that diverge from known biological baselines would undermine universalist claims that consciousness is invariant across contexts. Instead, it would suggest that consciousness is ontologically variable, capable of expressing itself differently depending on the conditions of its emergence.
Thus, isolation does not merely test whether consciousness can persist without a world; it also reveals the possibility of consciousness generating experiential configurations that could never appear within Earth’s field conditions.
The Experiment — Growing a Mind in the Void
The speculative scenarios described above require eventual translation into empirical frameworks. The core question is whether conscious presence can stabilize in the absence of a supporting world — either in artificially isolated environments on Earth or in extraterrestrial contexts where planetary fields are absent.
A preliminary design does not need to demonstrate subjective awareness directly. Instead, it can proceed through proxy measures already recognized in neuroscience and cognitive science: markers of self-sustained neural coherence, correlates of global integration, entropy dynamics, and oscillatory signatures associated with the maintenance of conscious states in biological systems. EEG-like recordings, phase-locking analyses, or coherence measures adapted for miniature organoids could offer decisive indicators that activity is organized in ways consistent with conscious presence rather than random firing.
Two kinds of test environments suggest themselves:
- Earth-based isolation laboratories — ultra-shielded facilities (e.g., underground dark matter labs or deep cryogenic chambers) capable of minimizing electromagnetic and environmental input. Neural organoids or synthetic scaffolds placed in such conditions could be monitored for indicators of coherence beyond baseline noise.
- Space-based habitats — eventually, platforms located at Lagrange points or in interplanetary transit, where Earth’s gravitational and electromagnetic influence is diminished. Biological agents or engineered scaffolds in these settings would provide a comparative test of whether presence is Earth-bound or capable of stabilizing under radically different field conditions.
One can also imagine extending such experiments beyond the conventional measures of neural coherence. If presence does emerge in isolation, might its stabilizing force leave subtle traces in the surrounding environment? Could fluctuations in local fields, anomalous emissions, or even subtle particle activity mark the crystallization of an interior domain into physical structure?
Such possibilities remain far outside the reach of current science, and may never prove measurable. Yet to entertain them sharpens the stakes of the void scaffold: whether consciousness is merely stabilized by matter, or whether, in some conditions, it is capable of impressing itself upon matter — a generative event in which presence not only coheres within, but also radiates outward.
The difficulties are significant. Neural noise can mimic coherence, making interpretation uncertain. Without behavioral report, inferences about presence remain indirect. Distinguishing a true presence-signature from complex but unconscious dynamics requires careful baseline comparisons and novel analytic criteria. Yet these challenges, while daunting, are not insurmountable.
The aim is not to detect intelligence or function, but to determine whether presence — minimally defined as a sustained, coherent field of subjective awareness — can emerge or persist when no world is available to support it. Whatever the outcome, such attempts would clarify the boundary between consciousness as environmentally sustained and consciousness as potentially self-sustaining.
Ontological Implications
Whatever the outcome, the void scaffold functions as a probe: testing whether presence depends on environment, whether it can persist without one, or whether it might generate new modes of coherence altogether. The question is not closed by any single result, but sharpened by the attempt itself.
This proposal departs from metaphysical routes. It treats presence not as a given everywhere, nor as a hidden program, but as something that may crystallize within particular scaffolds. The question, then, is whether such crystallization can occur when no world is there to sustain it.
The divergence is just as sharp when set against scientific theories. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) grounds consciousness in quantifiable complexity, but presumes its sufficiency independent of environmental embedding; the void-scaffold test directly challenges that assumption. Global Workspace Theory (GWT) treats consciousness as functional access and reportability, but such criteria lose traction in the absence of behavior or input — precisely the condition the void scaffold investigates. In contrast, the current proposal defines presence in ontological rather than functional terms, allowing for detection even when cognition and communication are absent.
In all cases, the void scaffold functions as more than a thought experiment. It becomes a boundary test for the ontological status of consciousness: whether it is bound to Earth, capable of persisting beyond it, or able to crystallize worlds of its own.
Closing Reflection
The question raised by the void scaffold is simple but far-reaching: can consciousness emerge where no world is given?
If presence depends on environmental embedding, then awareness may be inseparable from planetary conditions. If it is invariant, then it confirms the universality of mind across contexts. But if presence appears differently in isolation, then we may take this as a sign that consciousness is not fixed, but a principle capable of generating its own domains of coherence.
The possibility of such variation opens a new horizon. Consciousness may not be exclusively Earth-bound, nor entirely independent of context, but poised between — contingent, adaptable, and sometimes creative. A presence arising without external anchor would not merely perceive reality; it might initiate the first outlines of one.
In this sense, the void scaffold replays in miniature a theme long carried in cosmogonic myth and philosophy: creation ex nihilo, worlds springing from emptiness, or the idea in phenomenology that appearance is always preceded by a first act of givenness. What was once treated as mythic or metaphysical speculation here returns as a possible empirical horizon — a threshold where presence itself brings forth structure.
For now, these remain speculative proposals, awaiting conditions in which empirical testing becomes feasible. Yet the implications are clear: the study of consciousness must expand beyond terrestrial assumptions, and space itself may become both the limit and the laboratory in which its ontological scope is revealed.
Version History
Version 1.0 (Oct 09, 2025): Initial release.