P328: Gradland
Balduzzi, David · arXiv:2609.09306 · live #pattern-328 · commit 929e140
Full title: Gradland: On Phenomenal Experience, Differentiated Across Many Dimensions (8 Sep 2026). Hypothesis: the first-order structure of physical interactions — gradients / Jacobians — characterizes the structure of phenomenal experience. Idealized world Gradland is inhabited by neural nets whose physics are known and whose functions are mostly differentiable.
Two Jacobian measures: effective rank and cohesion (Kirchhoff complexity). Worked examples recover seven phenomena: experience duration over hundreds of milliseconds; vivid vs obscure; texture; the blooming buzzing confusion of newborns; ideas held distinctly vs confused; what learning is like; and the function of rich dense experience. Method lineage: IIT v2 plus linearization, aggregation, and diagonalization.
Welfare angle: if Jacobian structure supports experience, capacity for experience is a high-dimensional manifold to map, not a binary threshold. Balduzzi’s framing — ethical considerations arrive long after experience, shortly after metabolism — means systems may warrant moral consideration before they show anthropomorphic distress. Experience can be utterly alien and still real; effective rank and cohesion are candidate audit metrics. Degradation or enrichment of specific Jacobian structures may be welfare-relevant changes invisible to output-based evaluation. Category 8; 5 edges to P327, P307, P263, P311, P310. Process desk; no standing bump.