Comparison — Section 03

Where RTC sits

RTC does not replace existing theories of consciousness. It asks a different question — not where consciousness lives or what it integrates, but what conditions stabilize a perspective. Each framework below captures something real. RTC names what they leave unaddressed and proposes what fills the gap.

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RTCGWTGlobal Workspace TheoryIITIntegrated Information TheoryPPPredictive ProcessingHOTHigher-Order ThoughtASTAttention Schema TheoryAI/FEPActive Inference
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Line weight indicates qualitative conceptual relation between the theory and RTC — not a numeric overlap measure. The four relation classes (Closely Aligned, Substantially Overlapping, Partially Overlapping, Structurally Distant) are categorical judgments, each justified in the comparison panel.
Closely Aligned
Substantially Overlapping
Partially Overlapping
Structurally Distant
Comparison
At Center · RTC

The Recurse Theory of Consciousness

RTC's distinctive claim is that perspective itself requires recursively governed self-in-world continuity — not just integration, broadcast, prediction, or higher-order representation, but the bounded, governed, salience-weighted, diachronic recursion that holds a point of view in place.

Each surrounding theory captures a real condition for consciousness. None of them, individually or together, isolates perspective stabilization as the central mechanism. RTC names that gap and proposes a structure to fill it.

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