If consciousness is fundamental, what is the brain doing?

{
 "schema_version": 1,
 "artifact_type": "argument_fabric_dossier",
 "question_id": "q:brain-if-consciousness-fundamental",
 "question": "If consciousness is fundamental, what is the brain doing?",
 "why_it_matters": "This is the single most pressing empirical question for any consciousness-first ontology. Without a positive account of the brain's role, idealism and panpsychism remain speculative. A credible answer transforms the research programme from metaphysical critique to constructive explanation of the body–world relationship.",
 "status": "live_crux",
 "resolution_level": "interdisciplinary",
 "parent_questions": [
  "q:consciousness-fundamental",
  "q:kañcuka-mechanism"
 ],
 "candidate_explanations": [
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:brain-as-filter",
   "tradition_scope": "trika_perennialism",
   "name": "Brain as filter/contractive mechanism",
   "best_case": "The brain limits and constrains universal consciousness into a finite perspective. It does not generate consciousness but filters it through the kañcukas (limitation principles). Brain injury alters the filter; the analogy is a radio receiver that does not generate the signal but restricts its expression.",
   "hard_to_vary_core": [
    "Consciousness is universal; the brain restricts access to a local perspective via the six kañcukas (limitation, time, space, desire, knowledge, agency).",
    "Brain death removes the filter, so local consciousness ceases while universal consciousness continues.",
    "Brain damage alters the quality of experience because the filter is damaged, not because consciousness is produced by the damaged tissue."
   ],
   "current_problems": [
    "The filter analogy lacks a mechanism: how does neural tissue restrict universal consciousness?",
    "It must explain why specific neural correlates produce specific experiential modulations with the precision demanded by neuroscience.",
    "The view is hard to distinguish from epiphenomenalism if the brain only restricts and does not transform."
   ],
   "falsifiers": [
    {
     "type": "empirical",
     "condition": "A demonstration that local neural activity is causally sufficient for the entire content of a conscious experience, with the universal consciousness subtraction leaving no residual explanatory gap.",
     "status": "untested"
    }
   ],
   "initial_status": "live"
  },
  {
   "candidate_id": "cand:brain-as-interface-generative-model",
   "tradition_scope": "predictive_processing_idealism",
   "name": "Brain as generative model / interface",
   "best_case": "The brain constructs a controlled hallucination or generative model of the world. It does not produce consciousness but structures its appearance. The brain's role is to constrain which possibilities are manifest from the broader space of conscious states, analogous to an interface that organises information.",
   "hard_to_vary_core": [
    "The brain is a prediction engine that infers causes of sensory input, generating the experienced world as a controlled hallucination.",
    "Consciousness is the medium; the brain determines the mode of appearing, not the fact of appearing.",
    "Brain damage alters the generative model, changing how reality appears, not eliminating the substrate of appearing."
   ],
   "current_problems": [
    "The account inherits the hard problem: predictive processing explains the structure but not the presence of experience.",
    "It must explain how the generative model relates to the underlying conscious substrate without dualism.",
    "The 'controlled hallucination' framing may be compatible with physicalism, requiring further commitments to distinguish idealism."
   ],
   "falsifiers": [
    {
     "type": "empirical",
     "condition": "A demonstration that neural generative models are sufficient to produce all aspects of experience, including manifestness itself, without appealing to a conscious substrate.",
     "status": "untested"
    }
   ],
   "initial_status": "live"
  },
  {