Center "I" as a functional center of the nervous system. Reduction of subjective experience to neurophysiological processes.

Abstract This monograph represents the culmination of a research program initiated in Constructive Biology of Consciousness (2025, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17929865). The philosophical and anthropological analysis undertaken in the foundational work has led to a radical conclusion: "consciousness" and "the psyche" are not ontologically independent entities but convenient metaphors. Their functions are fully reducible to the operation of the Center "I" — a functional center of the nervous system. The Center "I" is a functional center of the nervous system, as physiologically real as the respiratory center, thermoregulation center, circadian oscillator, and hunger-satiety center. Its substrate is a stable dynamic configuration of three large-scale neural networks: DMN (Default Mode Network, providing autobiographical context and internalization of cultural codes), SN (Salience Network, carrying out affective tagging and switching between modes), and ECN (Central Executive Network, implementing cognitive control and effector programs). The function of the Center "I" is the integration of afferent streams (including internalized cultural codes) into a coherent "self-in-world" model. This model is necessary for the coordination of local effector outputs of the decentralized nervous system. The Center "I" does not make decisions instead of local structures and has no effector output of its own, but without it, the local effector outputs of individual structures cannot be coordinated and identified as emanating from a single source. Dysfunction of the Center "I" produces a reproducible clinical phenotype: depersonalization, derealization, personality disorders. The work demonstrates that there is no consciousness as a separate entity. There is a nervous system which, in the process of its work, configures the "I" model as a functional coordination center. Introducing an additional entity is ontologically redundant and terminologically harmful.