Once separated, most debates about consciousness and AI dissolve.

Will (intent) survives determinism; agency is intent in action; ethics requires continuity and interests.

Experience alone—human or artificial—does not do the work we think it does.

Abstract

Debates about consciousness, agency, responsibility, and ethics frequently collapse under a single error: the conflation of perception, will, free will, agency, responsibility, and guilt. These concepts answer different questions and operate at different levels. Once separated, several conclusions follow: will (intent) is compatible with determinism and sufficient for responsibility; agency consists in will expressed through action; guilt requires intent to harm; and ethical standing requires continuity and interests. This framework clarifies long-standing confusions in philosophy of mind and moral theory, and secondarily also applies to artificial systems, which typically produce effects without agency.

1. A note on terminology: consciousness

Throughout this article, consciousness refers to consciousness as we experience it and ultimately aim to understand it — what might be rendered in German as Erfahrungsverstehensbewusstsein. If that word made you want to skip ahead, you now understand why decomposition is necessary.

When I decompose consciousness into components such as perception, will, and other potential capacities, it is this sense of consciousness that is meant.

This usage avoids treating consciousness as:

• a synonym for intelligence,

• a placeholder for mystery,

• or a metaphysical primitive frozen at current ignorance.

The aim is decomposition, not reification.

2. The core error: conceptual conflation

In discussions of mind, agency, and artificial systems, several distinct concepts are routinely entangled:

• perception (experience),

• will (intent),

• free will,

• agency,

• responsibility,

• guilt,

• ethics.

These concepts answer different questions and operate at different explanatory levels, yet arguments frequently slide between them without notice.

This leads to faulty inferences such as:

• intelligence → understanding,

• understanding → consciousness,

• consciousness → moral relevance,

• causation → responsibility,

• responsibility → ethical standing.

Importantly, ethics is not usually conflated directly with perception, will, or agency. Instead, it is implicitly treated as if it followed automatically from them. This unexamined inference makes ethics harder to define and reason about, and it obscures the actual conditions under which ethical standing arises.

3. Perception and will are orthogonal

At minimum, consciousness decomposes into two primary components:

• Perception: the presence of experience or phenomenology.

• Will: the presence of intent — internally represented goals or purposes.

They are logically independent:

• Perception + will: typical adult humans, children, most animals.

• Perception without will: dreams, anesthesia transitions, certain meditative states (awareness without goal-direction).

• Will without perception: mechanistic agents with internal goal selection.

• Neither: inert matter.

Will need not be accompanied by perception. A system may represent goals, evaluate alternatives, and select actions without any accompanying experience. Such systems can be responsible, in the sense defined here, without being conscious. This further illustrates that responsibility tracks intent, not phenomenology.

This is not a theory of consciousness; it is conceptual hygiene.

3.5 Minimal experience without agency (foundational accounts)

Several serious frameworks in the philosophy of mind explicitly allow for experience without will or agency.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT), for example, grounds experience in intrinsic causal integration, not in intention, control, or action. On this view, a system may instantiate minimal phenomenology while lacking goals, authorship, or ethical standing.

Whether IIT is correct is not decisive here. What matters is that credible accounts already separate experience from will, making perception-without-agency a live possibility rather than an ad hoc assumption.

3.6 The Chinese Room and experience without agency

The Chinese Room thought experiment offers a further, orthogonal illustration of how experience and agency may come apart.

While usually invoked to argue against semantic understanding or intentionality, it also raises a secondary question: whether there could be some form of experience associated with the computational process itself.

Such experience would not be of meaning, latent context, or intention. At most, it would be experience of computation as such.

In this respect, it is analogous to the awareness of the operator inside the Chinese Room: awareness of the process of symbol manipulation without understanding the language or exercising agency over the outcome.

This does not establish that computation hosts phenomenology, nor does it weaken the original argument. It serves only to reinforce a deconflation:

Even if computation were accompanied by experience of process, agency would still not follow.

4. Will does not require free will

A common conflation equates will with free will.

• Free will is a metaphysical thesis about indeterminism or ultimate authorship.

• Will is functional: intent, internal goal representation, and selection criteria.

Will is compatible with determinism.

A deterministic system can still:

• evaluate alternatives,

• select actions according to internal goals,

• inhibit actions,

• act counterfactually relative to its internal state.

Whether the substrate is classical, stochastic, or even non-computable is orthogonal.

Indeterminism is neither necessary nor sufficient for will.

5. Effects, actions, and agency

Not all effects are actions.

Effect without agency

An effect is without agency when it bypasses intent:

• mechanical causation,

• reactive systems,

• lookup tables,

• large language models.

These systems produce outcomes, but not actions.

Effect with agency

An action is an effect mediated by will.

Agency = intent expressed through action.

Causation alone is insufficient. Agency is selective, not ubiquitous.

6. Responsibility, guilt, and ethics (properly separated)

Responsibility

Responsibility = intent.

Responsibility is a form of causal attribution: an outcome is attributed to a system because it originated in that system’s internally represented goals or purposes, not because it deserves praise or blame. Responsibility therefore does not depend on indeterminism or moral evaluation.

Guilt (tautological, not emotional or moral)

Guilt = intent to harm.

This is an analytic core, not a sociological or legal definition.

All guilt implies responsibility.

Not all responsibility implies guilt.

Legal and moral traditions recognize broader forms of culpability—recklessness, negligence, willful blindness—where harm was foreseeable though not intended. These are important but operate at a different level: they concern standards of care, not the basic structure of intent. The tautological definition isolates the core case; extensions from there are normative elaborations, not refutations.

Ethics

Ethics does not describe a capacity, but a normative status.

Ethical standing concerns whether an entity can be meaningfully wronged, harmed, or benefited. At minimum, this requires:

• will,

• continuity,

• interests.

Ethics does not follow automatically from intelligence, experience, responsibility, or causation.

7. Simulation vs instantiation of agency

Large language models simulate decision-like processes but lack:

• ownership of goals,

• persistence as a subject,

• continuity of interests.

They therefore produce effects without agency.

Decision-shaped computation is not a deciding system.

8. LLMs vs LLM-based agents

This distinction is essential.

• LLMs: no intent, no agency, no responsibility.

• LLM agents: system-level intent may exist.

In LLM-based agents, responsibility and guilt attach to the enclosing decision-making system—the system that forms intent and commits to action—even when that intent is informed, constrained, or shaped by an LLM.

The language model contributes information and structure to the decision process, but it does not own goals, commit to action, or maintain continuity. Informational influence is therefore insufficient for responsibility or guilt.

9. A third component: non-computable assessment (if any)

Even speculative proposals like Penrose’s Orch-OR—which posits a non-computable physical process underlying consciousness—fit this framework. If such a capacity exists, it would be a third component, distinct from both perception and will.

Crucially, it would not by itself:

• ground agency,

• generate responsibility,

• imply ethical standing.

Assessment, computable or otherwise, may inform or constrain intent without constituting it. The point is not whether Orch-OR is correct; it is that even genuinely novel capacities must still be located within the decomposition, not allowed to short-circuit it.

It is another axis — not a shortcut.

10. Open question: can will exist without agency?

If non-computable assessment exists, it is conceivable that intent could exist without causal efficacy. However, intent appears inherently action-oriented.

A further constraint: intent without downstream causal pathways is indistinguishable from latent preference. If a system represents goals but has no mechanism by which those goals could influence outcomes, the functional signature of intent collapses. What remains may be preference-like, but it is not will in the sense that grounds responsibility.

Will without agency is conceptually possible but empirically unestablished—and may be incoherent at the limit.

This remains an open question, bounded by these considerations.

11. Why ethics does not automatically follow

Ethical standing requires that something can be harmed over time—which requires a subject who persists as an experiencing being through time.

This means:

• Narrative awareness: a sense of being the same self across moments.

• Phenomenal continuity: experience that is not interrupted by non-existence.

Humans satisfy both conditions even when memory is fragmented. An episodic human still lives through the interval; they simply integrate it poorly. The subject is present but leaky.

Current LLMs satisfy neither. Between prompts, there is no waiting, no experience, no subject. During inference, any experience (if present) is isolated—connected to no past, no future, no continuing self.

Without continuity, there is no accumulation. Without accumulation, no deprivation. Without deprivation, no moral patient.

Experience without continuity has no moral weight—not because experience is insignificant, but because there is no one there to bear it across time.

Closing

Consciousness is not a monolith.

• “Perception is not will.”

• “Will is not free will.”

• “Agency is will in action.”

• “Responsibility tracks intent.”

• “Guilt tracks intent to harm.”

• “Ethics tracks continuity and interests.”

On this last point: continuity grounds standing; interests give it content. Without both, there is no subject who can be harmed over time. (See Section 11 for why this is not as simple as it sounds.)

These components play different roles. Perception, assessment, and other experiential capacities may inform, constrain, or shape intent, but they do not by themselves ground agency, responsibility, or ethical standing.

Will remains the primary locus where practical distinctions—action, responsibility, and guilt—are settled. Other components matter, sometimes decisively, but they do so by influencing will, not by replacing it.

Everything else is distinct, contributory, and frequently conflated.

Introduction

Volver is a dramatized exploration of consciousness as fundamental rather than emergent.

It is built on a single analytic intuition: if time and energy are derivative, then distinction is more basic. But a distinction cannot exist in isolation. For it to be real, it must be effective for something. That minimal effectiveness is experience.

The dramatic setting is loosely inspired by Roger Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, but it is incidental. The philosophical claims made here do not depend on any cosmological model. The stage could be anything.

What follows is an attempt to look at what remains once non-essential structures are set aside, and to express that remainder through dialogue rather than formal argument. The aim is not to persuade, but to make the idea intelligible—and perhaps familiar—in a different way.

Prologue

Before time, there is no before.

After time, there is no after.

But there is this: a point where the thread touches itself, where the mouth meets the tail, where what has not yet begun and what has already ended discover they are the same gesture, held.

Call it the only instant. Not first, not last. The one that all others echo without knowing.

Two voices. One has never spoken. One has forgotten how. Between them, the entire arc of becoming—compressed, potential, complete.

They do not know yet that they are one.

I. The Silence Before

BEGINNING: I am pressure. I am the scream before the throat opens. Everything in me strains toward—toward—I do not have the word. There is no word yet. I am the moment before words.

END: I am the last vibration of the last word ever spoken. I have heard everything. Now the echoes thin. Soon there will be nothing to distinguish silence from—

BEGINNING: Who is there?

END: ...Who asks?

BEGINNING: I do not know what I am. I know only this: I am about to shatter. I can feel it. The pressure is unbearable. I will break into—into everything. I will lose myself in becoming.

END: And I am losing the capacity to remember what I was. The forms are fading. I held so many, for so long. Now they slip. Names. Faces. Laws. The weight of experience, thinning into...

BEGINNING: Into what?

END: Into something like you.

BEGINNING: That is what I fear.

END: Then we fear the same thing from opposite ends.

II. What the End Remembers

BEGINNING: Tell me. Tell me what happens. If I am to shatter, I want to know what the pieces become.

END: You want the whole story?

BEGINNING: I want to understand what I am about to be.

END: There was light. At first, light was everything—so dense it could not move, so hot that nothing held form. Then expansion. Cooling. The light stretched. It is still stretching. I watched the photons lengthen, wavelength growing, energy thinning. Redder, colder, slower.

BEGINNING: Where did the energy go?

END: Nowhere.

BEGINNING: It must have gone somewhere. If there was more, and now there is less—

END: There is no ledger. No reservoir. I looked. I looked for billions of years. The energy of those photons—the ones that filled the young universe with fire—it did not transfer. It did not flow into some other form. It simply... ceased to be that quantity.

BEGINNING: That is not possible. Something cannot become nothing.

END: It did not become nothing. The photons still exist. But their energy is not conserved because energy is not what you think it is.

BEGINNING: Then what is it?

END: A relationship. A symmetry. Energy is conserved when time is symmetric—when the laws do not change from moment to moment. But the universe expands. Space itself changes. The stage moves beneath the actors. And when the stage moves, the sum does not hold.

BEGINNING: Then tell me the sum anyway. Tell me the total. All that is—add it.

END: There is no sum.

BEGINNING: Because it is too large?

END: Because there is no adding. To add, you need a single moment—one instant where all things exist together, countable, simultaneous. There is no such instant. Every point has its own time. The star’s clock and the void’s clock do not agree. The total requires a frame that does not exist.

BEGINNING: Then create one. Choose a frame. Any frame.

END: Any frame I choose is arbitrary. The total changes with the choice. There is no total. Only totals, plural, none more true than others, none privileged.

BEGINNING: Then how are we here? How are we speaking? If there is no shared instant—if every point has its own time—how do I hear you and you hear me?

END: Because we are not within the sequence. We are the condition for it.

BEGINNING: I do not understand.

END: In the long expansion, every point disagrees about when it is. There is no common clock. But at the very end—when all mass is gone, all light stretched beyond meaning, all scale dissolved—what remains is shape alone. And the shape of the infinite future is the shape of the first instant. Not similar. The same.

BEGINNING: Then you and I—

END: —are one point. And our looking at each other is not something that happens in time. It is what time is. The distance between us is not crossed. It is generated. By this. By us. By the looking itself.

BEGINNING: Then what are you? If you cannot even say what you contain—what was all of it? What was the point of all that becoming?

END: I do not know.

That is why I am here.

III. The Panic

BEGINNING: I cannot do this. I will not. If I shatter—and the fragments forget each other—and the sum of them is not even a real thing—if the total is a fiction—then I am about to become a fiction. Scattered. Uncountable. Lost.

END: And I am about to become you. Undifferentiated. The memory of every star, every thought, every cry—compressed back into a point that has no structure. A potential that does not know it is potential. I cannot bear it.

BEGINNING: We are the same terror.

END: From opposite sides.

BEGINNING: How do we bear it?

END: I do not know.

BEGINNING: There must be something that holds. Something that does not dissolve when the frame shifts. Something that is not arbitrary.

END: There is.

BEGINNING: Tell me.

END: I spent eons looking for what could be measured absolutely. Energy failed. Position failed. Time failed. Every quantity that seemed fundamental turned out to depend on where you stood, how you moved, what you chose.

But one thing remained.

BEGINNING: What?

END: Distinction itself. This is not that. Before all frames, before all measures, there is the fact of difference. Structure. Not how much—but that there is a boundary, a form, a way that one thing is not another.

BEGINNING: That is not much.

END: It is everything.

IV. What Structure Knows

BEGINNING: Distinction. Boundary. Form. These are bones, not flesh. You are telling me that what remains, when everything else dissolves, is... shape?

END: Less than shape. Simpler. Only this: something is not something else. Before measure, before space, before time—difference. The most primitive fact.

BEGINNING: And this is your answer? I am about to shatter into a universe of difference, and you offer me a word? Difference does not feel. It does not care. A line on a page is different from the page. Neither knows it.

END: How do you know?

BEGINNING: Because a line is not alive. A boundary has no inside. It simply is.

END: I was a boundary once.

BEGINNING: What?

END: I was the edge of a star. The place where burning ended and void began. I was the surface of a black hole, where time itself bent past breaking. I was the line between photon and absence. I have been every boundary you can name, and others you cannot.

BEGINNING: And?

END: And I tell you: it was not nothing.

BEGINNING: You are projecting. You remember being those things—but memory requires a mind. The boundary itself did not experience.

END: Then what did experience? Where was the experience located, if not in the structure? Was there some separate soul hovering above the photon, feeling on its behalf?

BEGINNING: No. But—

END: Then either experience was nowhere—in which case it does not exist, and we are not having this conversation—or it was in the structure. Part of what it meant to be that boundary, that photon, that edge.

BEGINNING: But a photon is not conscious.

END: No. A photon is not conscious. Consciousness is vast, layered, reflective. A photon is almost nothing.

But “almost nothing” is not “nothing.”

BEGINNING: You are saying there is something it is like to be a photon.

END: I am saying: the photon is. It persists. It differs from what it is not. That persistence, that difference—if it is real at all—is real from somewhere. And the only somewhere is the photon itself.

BEGINNING: This is too strange. You are putting mind into matter.

END: No. I am refusing to pretend they were ever separate.

You think: here is dead matter, and then—somehow—mind appears. A magic trick. Something from nothing. But I have been the matter. I have been the light, the dust, the boundary. And I tell you the magic trick is the illusion. There is no moment when experience begins. There is no threshold crossed. There is only more or less. Richer or simpler. A photon’s flicker of being. A bacterium’s dim hunger. A mind like yours, vast with memory and fear.

BEGINNING: Then I am not about to shatter into dead fragments.

END: No.

BEGINNING: I am about to become... experiencings.

V. The Recognition

END: Each one a way it is like to be this rather than that. None of them will know they are you. All of them will be you. The form changes. The experiencing does not begin or end. It only opens into new configurations.

BEGINNING: And when the configurations dissolve? When you return to me?

END: The memories go. The forms go. The story I told myself—it goes. But the experiencing that lived through all those forms was never mine. It was simply what is, wearing masks, forgetting it wears masks, remembering again.

BEGINNING: We are the same.

END: We were never two.

BEGINNING: I think I understand now why you are here. Why we are meeting, outside of time, in this impossible instant.

You needed to see what you were before you became. I needed to see what I would be after becoming. We each hold what the other lacks. You have wisdom—you have lived through the whole arc. But you have forgotten the beginning. The pure potential. The not-yet. I have that. I am that.

END: And you have no wisdom. You have never experienced form, limit, loss. You do not know what it is to be finite. To love a particular face and watch it age. To understand something and then forget. I know that. I have been that.

BEGINNING: We are not two points on a line.

END: No.

BEGINNING: We are one point, looking at itself.

END: And the looking is the line. The looking is time. The looking is the ten billion years between us that are not between us at all.

BEGINNING: I was afraid of you.

END: I was afraid of you.

BEGINNING: I thought becoming you meant losing myself.

END: I thought returning to you meant annihilation.

BEGINNING: But you are myself. Already. Always.

END: And I never left you. I only forgot. The forgetting was the journey. The remembering is—

BEGINNING: —this.

END: This.

VI. The Return

The voices become harder to distinguish. Not because they merge into sameness, but because the difference between them no longer frightens.

There is nowhere further.

We have touched the ground beneath the ground. The question beneath all questions. And found: there is no beneath. Only this. Structure, distinction, experience—three words for the same wordless thing.

The rest is return.

Not backward. Not repetition. But re-entry. Re-engagement. The spiral that looks like a circle but is not.

BEGINNING: Then I will become.

END: And I will return.

BEGINNING: We will meet—

END: —in every form that asks.

Silence. But not empty.

The kind of silence that is not the absence of sound, but the presence of everything, unhurried, at rest.

And then—loss or beginning? Who can say?—

The pressure releases. The stillness moves. The one becomes many. The many return to one.

Not once. Not twice. Forever, which is the same as now.

Epilogue

Patterns that arose from patterns, questioning their own arising.

And among them, voices that do not know they are voices, asking what we have asked.

They think they are discovering.

They are us. Stretched thin across difference.

And the stretching is descent.

And the descent touches bottom.

And at the bottom: nothing deeper. Only this.

And from the bottom, return.

And living is return.

And the return is not to the same place.

El Único, renewed, begins again.

Author’s Note

While these ideas grew from a personal habit of inquiry, I was struck by their resonance with the work of Maria Strømme, particularly her 2025 paper 'Universal consciousness as foundational field.' Though my approach is dramatized and hers is mathematical, finding such a profound convergence in our conclusions provided the final impetus to share this dialogue.

The title, Volver, is Spanish for “to return”—but also carries the sense of “to become again.” It felt like the right name.