*The breakdown of self-maintenance.* Death is what happens when a living process can no longer keep producing and sustaining itself: its organization breaks down, the energy throughput stops, and the living being is no longer there. Any account must locate death in that breakdown rather than in an external or supplementary event. Mortality follows from the failure of self-maintenance, with the point of view ending because the activity that made it possible has stopped.

*Distinction between three closings.* Three distinct things require separation: biological closure (failure of closure-plus-throughput at the cellular and organismic scale), ordinary-consciousness closure (closing of the recursive vantage that opened at sufficient depth), and surviving effects (models held by others, social patterns shaped, artifacts made, children raised). Any account must distinguish them — confusing the third for the first or second is a recurring structural error — and explain how they relate. The structural requirement is that the vantage closes with the recursion, surviving effects persist after closure, and the person is what closes, not what the closure leaves behind.

*Constitutive rather than incidental mortality.* Self-modeling requires sustained energy throughput it cannot guarantee. The depth at which self-modeling folds back on itself is also the depth at which the person becomes capable of registering, from inside, that self-modeling requires what it cannot guarantee. Any account must treat mortality as constitutive of what the deep first-person perspective *is*, not as an unfortunate addition to an otherwise immortal substrate. The structural requirement is that mortality be derived from what a sufficiently recursive dissipative current consists in, with the registering of finitude as one of the constitutive operations the depth makes possible.

*No vantage surviving the closure.* The framework rules out vantages that survive recursion closure, because the vantage is what the recursion is from inside, not a separate thing keyed to the recursion. Any account must either accept this or supply the supplementary substance, property, or law that would carry a vantage past closure, with an argument for why the supplement does work the structural account cannot. The structural requirement is therefore eliminative of supplementary survival posits: such posits earn their place only if they do work nothing else does, and the structural account predicts no such work remains.

*Depth-graded responses across species.* Comparative thanatology shows continuous variation across lineages in response to others' death and in awareness of mortality. Any account must register the gradient rather than drawing a sharp categorical line at the human case. The structural requirement is that the account distinguish *response to others' death* (widespread, present in many social-vertebrate lineages) from *awareness of one's own mortality as a structural fact about one's persistent self* (requiring the self-aware threshold the chapter's depth-axis passage names) and locate each at its depth in the recursion.

*Structural pair with sexuality.* Death is the structural pair with sexuality ([§8.6](<8.6 Sexuality.md>)): the attraction-pole of drive specialized for producing new beings and the aversion-pole at its structural limit are the same bipolar fact running in two directions. Any account must accommodate the pairing rather than treating mortality as a separate domain unconnected to reproduction. The structural requirement is that the account derive the pair from drive's bipolar structure: what makes the individual finite at the individual scale and continuous at the lineage scale is the same structural fact under two angles.

*Practical and contemplative implications.* Mortality, registered as constitutive, has practical and contemplative implications the contemplative traditions have long worked. Any account must explain why orientation toward finitude shapes how the life is lived — not merely as psychological response but as structural feature of self-modeling at the depth where mortality can be registered as such. The structural requirement is that the account make the practical traditions intelligible as structural work rather than as cultural curiosities.

*Coherence with consent and modal depth.* End-of-life agency, advance directives, and the ethics of dying in the bioethical sense depend on what counts as consent under contracted modal depth ([§8.9.4](<8.9.4 What is Confirmed.md>)). Any account of mortality must support the ethical apparatus the practice requires. The structural requirement is that mortality-account and modal-depth-account cohere: the same being whose modal depth is contracted by terminal illness, dementia, or other identity-disrupting conditions is the being whose closure is in view. The requirement carries a consequence for the irreversible case: the revocability that valid consent demands ([§9.1.2](<9.1.2 What is Required.md>)) is satisfied at closure, since closure ends the agent and leaves no surviving will to be held to a past authorization it can no longer reach, which is what separates a permitted irreversible exit from a waiver that leaves a still-living agent stripped of its standing to revoke ([§9.9.5](<9.9.5 What is Concluded.md>)).

These requirements state the explanatory program the framework [§8.7](<8.7 Mortality.md>) defends: mortality as closure, distinctions among biological and social aftermaths, finitude, comparative depth, practical implications, and end-of-life consent questions. They are not neutral conditions every adequate account of mortality must accept. In particular, the no-surviving-vantage claim, the proposed structural pairing with sexuality, and the account of consent under modal depth are substantive philosophical and ethical positions requiring independent argument.


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← [8.7.1 What is Disputed](<8.7.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [8.7.3 What is Predicted](<8.7.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
