Patrick Hogue

The study of consciousness contains hundreds of competing explanations but lacks a shared standard for comparing their empirical progress. This paper introduces the Continuum Standard for Theory Progression (CSTP), an ontology-neutral method that ranks positions cumulatively from falsifiable but untested claims through prospective testing, blind or held-out evaluation, independent corroboration, and adversarial survival. The rules assigning standing are fixed before evaluation. CSTP is first applied to sixteen positions and research programs drawn broadly across Robert Lawrence Kuhn’s Landscape of Consciousness. The resulting distribution shows no simple relationship between metaphysical orientation and evidentiary standing. Strong and weak records occur across physicalist and non-physicalist regions, while severe prospective testing of central claims about consciousness remains uncommon. Only after the standard and the sixteen initial grades are fixed is a seventeenth position introduced. Empirical Metaphysics predicts that transcendental narratives contain two jointly measurable properties: stable sequential organization and recoverable ontological content. Its first instrument represents near-death narratives as transitions through a fixed phenomenological state sequence. The observed ordering survives frequency-preserving nulls, recurs in held-out data, and survives twenty-two adversarial disconfirmation runs across nine separate frontier-model families. A second, methodologically separate instrument extracts and scores ontological content from non-overlapping corpora. Its outputs show strong cross-model convergence and align most closely with a prediction set fixed before the later comparison narratives were analyzed. Under the stated CSTP rules, Empirical Metaphysics reaches rung 4 through convergent results from separate instruments and adversarial testing. Independent laboratory replication and blind human coding remain open and are identified as the next decisive tests. The result demonstrates that anomalous, survival-related, and non-physicalist claims can be placed under the same demanding standards of prediction, failure, replication, and adversarial challenge used elsewhere in science. More broadly, CSTP provides a common procedure by which competing consciousness theories can be compared without granting exemption or imposing exclusion based on ontology.

Patrick Hogue is a theoretician, CEO of WX Worldwide, and founder of the Institute for Reality Advancement. His work develops empirical methods for evaluating claims about consciousness, transcendental experience, and ontology. Earlier in his career, while constructing pioneering research-and-development lithium extraction facilities in Chile’s Atacama Desert, he set two industry world records. He has delivered formal presentations at Stanford University by invitation of Kleiner Perkins, the Paris Air Show for CFM, the General Motors Technical Center, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the DEER Conference in San Diego. In consciousness studies, he was an invited presenter at the 2024 IANDS National Conference in Washington, D.C., and at the Vail Institute in Vail, Colorado, and co-presented a concurrent session at the 2024 Tucson consciousness conference.