What, Even, Is This? (Part II) — Mapping a Pre-Categorical Theory of Consciousness
What follows is a concept map articulating the core components of my theory. It is divided into two levels. The first situates the philosophy of mind and consciousness within a broader family of disciplines, each contributing a necessary component to a comprehensive theory of consciousness.
Level 1: Interdisciplinary Map
Level 1 is not an ontological claim but a pragmatic map of research domains and explanatory competencies, intended to streamline terminology into a coherent diagram and situate different approaches within a shared investigative landscape.
Unconscious → Conscious → Superconscious
Here, “unconscious” refers to earlier-evolved, automatic, and largely introspectively inaccessible processes that regulate perception, affect, motivation, habit formation, and bodily homeostasis without entering phenomenal awareness.
Neurobiologically, these processes are implemented in subcortical and distributed cortical circuits, including the brainstem arousal systems, basal ganglia, amygdala, hypothalamus, cerebellum, and large portions of the default and salience networks.
This unconscious domain includes phylogenetically ancient systems such as the ascending reticular activating system, which regulates arousal, wakefulness, and sensory gating, providing necessary background conditions for consciousness without itself constituting phenomenal experience. There is also the periaqueductal gray, which is involved in fundamental survival functions—pain modulation, defensive behaviors (freeze/flight/fight), vocalization, and affective responses—and operates largely outside of introspective awareness while powerfully shaping perception, motivation, and behavior. (Google Search; Gemini)
Empirically, this domain is investigated through mapping neural correlates such as predictive processing, sensorimotor loops, affective valuation systems, and pre-attentive processing, and constitutes the primary explanatory scope of contemporary neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
At this level, “conscious” is used as a coarse descriptive label, while phenomenal consciousness refers specifically to subjective experience proper—the explanandum of the theory of consciousness.
“Superconscious” denotes expanded or altered ranges of phenomenal consciousness studied in contemplative, psychedelic/entheogenic, and religious contexts, without implying metaphysical superiority or privileged epistemic authority.
Phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) is the subjective, qualitative aspect of experience—what it feels like to see red, taste chocolate, feel pain, or experience joy. It is the raw “what it’s like” sensation behind our awareness, which is constituted by qualia (the phenomenal properties). Within the context of my theory, all mentions of consciousness refer specifically to P-consciousness unless otherwise stated.
Access consciousness (A-consciousness) designates information that is globally available for reasoning and action without, by itself, constituting phenomenal experience, forming a functional bridge between unconscious processing and conscious report.
Level 2: The Framework of Co-Emergence
So far, consciousness has been described as spectral—more precisely, access to the substrate from which consciousness arises varies along a continuum between two limiting extremes. The resolution of experience depends on position along this scale.
substrate → unified field → bifurcation → A+B :
A: physics
B: awareness → consciousness
Substrate (primordial, undifferentiated interiority): The substrate is the pre-ontological condition of possibility; the unified field is its first structured articulation, encoding the lawful space of differentiation from which both physical reality and conscious experience co-emerge as complementary resolutions.
The substrate enables articulation; the unified field structures possibility. Indeterminacy resolves via symmetry breaking. Two inseparable but non-identical aspects emerge: physics as extrinsic structure and awareness as intrinsic presence. Consciousness arises as awareness stabilizes and integrates over time, through processes of recursive self-modeling that organize perspectival presence into a coherent, temporally extended subjectivity.
Awareness (first-order recursion) is automatic and reflexive, following a basic “mirroring principle” by which environmental states are registered as internally correlated patterns. It establishes the phenomenal boundaries of the space in which experience occurs. Organisms register and respond to their environments within this space, but this registration does not yet constitute the integrated, temporally extended subjectivity we call consciousness. Some higher-order animals—dogs, octopi, dolphins, and primates—access this space more fully, approaching a partial analogue of human-like experiential integration with higher computational resolution.
Consciousness emerges as a second-order recursion of awareness. Through recursive self-modeling, it organizes perspectival presence into an integrated, temporally extended subjectivity. This level of awareness is no longer merely reflexive; it possesses a high degree of agency and flexible intentionality, enabling the organism to navigate complex environments, engage in meta-cognition, and manipulate its own cognitive processes.
As recursive self-modeling reaches higher thresholds, consciousness can extend beyond the immediate boundaries of the self, accessing a wider space in which the ego’s usual limits may dissolve. At these thresholds, the organism experiences higher-order awareness that is both expansive and coherent, capable of integrating multiple layers of phenomenological and informational structure simultaneously.
Recursion
In this framework, recursion is not simple repetition or looping. It is the iterative re-entry of structured reference frames into the non-local field that conditions them. The substrate provides a non-local, pre-categorical field of potentiality, which the unified field structures into differentiated possibilities. Awareness arises as relative and subjective frames are instantiated within this structured space. Recursion is the process by which these frames are iteratively projected, referenced, and folded back onto the substrate: each iteration models not just the local contents of a frame, but the relationships between frames, and the constraints imposed by the underlying non-local field.
This frame-folding allows first-order awareness to generate second-order consciousness: the system’s representation of itself within itself, integrating temporal sequences, stabilizing a coherent self, and enabling the emergence of agentic, temporally extended subjectivity. Recursion is thus neither a mysterious faculty nor a metaphysical add-on. It is the formal principle by which intrinsic presence, rooted in the substrate and structured by the unified field, elaborates into complex higher-order consciousness.
Frame of Reference
A frame of reference is a structured standpoint from which distinctions are drawn and relations become intelligible. It specifies what counts as “here” and “there,” “self” and “world,” “input” and “output,” by fixing a set of coordinates—conceptual, perceptual, or computational—relative to which phenomena can be organized and interpreted.
In physics, a frame of reference determines how motion, position, and causality are described uniformly (according to a shared set of rules) relative to an observer. In cognitive and psychological contexts, it plays an analogous role: it is the orienting structure shaped by embodiment, memory, and learned constraints, that determines how experience is parsed, meanings are assigned, and actions become possible.
Crucially, a frame of reference is not merely a passive viewpoint. It is an active constraint on computation: it governs what information can be represented, how it is transformed, and what kinds of feedback are possible. Different frames therefore do not merely describe the same reality differently; they enact different functional realities.
