Most theories of consciousness make no specific falsifiable predictions. BFUT Paper 20 makes five. Each can be confirmed or refuted by experiment. Here is their current status.
Prediction 1: The Channel Hierarchy Prediction
No sensing capability will be observed without a physically realisable structural configuration enabling the relevant interaction channel. New biological sensing modalities discovered in the future will be reducible to one of the four fundamental force channels or their emergent collective manifestations.
Status: Open but strongly supported. All known sensing modalities have been successfully reduced to the four-channel hierarchy. No known sensing modality requires a fifth fundamental force. No counterexample found.
Prediction 2: The No Independent Channel Prediction
No fifth fundamental sensing channel will be required. Any newly discovered capability will arise from new structural organisation of existing channels, not from a previously unknown fundamental interaction.
Status: Open and strong. No fifth force detected at any energy scale. The prediction would be falsified by a new fundamental force enabling sensing in a system without the four-force structural prerequisites.
Prediction 3: The Suppression Prediction
Removal of a lower-order structural prerequisite eliminates access to the corresponding higher-order sensing capability.
Status: Confirmed across all five tested scenarios. Ionising radiation, protein denaturation, axonal degeneration, ATP synthesis inhibition, and sodium channel blockade all confirm the prediction exactly. No exception found.
Prediction 4: The Degradation Floor Prediction
Structural degradation reduces the degree of consciousness but never to zero. Any system with mass retains minimum non-zero CI corresponding to gravitational channel coupling.
Status: Consistent with all known physics. Would be falsified by a non-zero-mass system not satisfying the gravitational sensing conditions. No such case identified.
Prediction 5: The Astrobiology Prediction
Life detection should be reframed as searching for multi-channel integration with feedback and memory — not carbon chemistry.
Status: Open. No systematic search using these criteria has been conducted. No confirmation or refutation yet.
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