What "thing" is consciousness?
How does mind interact with body?
Why are qualia private and unmeasurable?
Can free will and determinism coexist?
What kind of "occurrence" is consciousness?
How do two sides of the same relational network couple?
How can we measure the dynamical texture of the global EM field?
How can we quantify A-network's navigational capacity?
Hard problem · Spectrum inversion · Philosophical zombie · Other minds · Free will · Brain in a vat · Chinese room · Mary's room · Ship of Theseus · Homunculus · Newcomb's paradox · Libet experiment · Quantum measurement problem · Teleportation paradox · Swampman · Boltzmann brain
Attractor type (depression/addiction) · Shallow-basin type (ADHD/mania) · Repulsor inversion (schizophrenia) · Coupling rupture (autism) · Structural capacity decline (Alzheimer's) · Slow-variable instability (bipolar)
Lucid dreams · Nightmares & erotic dreams · Childhood time dilation · Flow vs anxiety work-heat ratio · Meditative dynamical structure · Near-death experience & sleep cycles
Consciousness is not any form of "substance" or "attribute." It is an ongoing, self-referential, non-periodic dynamical process emerging from the coupling of four information streams — E External Projection, I Internal Recurrence, B Body Undertone, A Active Regulation — within a biological neural system meeting specific complexity conditions. It is directly realized in the global electromagnetic field, and its subjective manifestation is the unique dynamical texture of each moment.
1. A criterion of consciousness: three necessary and sufficient conditions (a continuous field carrier, E-I-B-A completeness, the Edge of Chaos), turning "does an AI have consciousness?" from a philosophical dispute into a testable engineering question.
2. The philosophical hard problem: not answered, but dissolved — arguments such as "structure requires realization" show that experience necessarily corresponds to a physical mechanism, so the explanatory gap arises from how the question is posed, not from a fissure in nature.
3. A unified mechanism for psychopathology: depression, addiction, ADHD, schizophrenia, autism and Alzheimer's reduce to six attractor failure modes, with quantifiable predictions.
4. The flow rate of subjective time: self-referential frequency ⋆(t) and consciousness flux 𝔖 quantify "why childhood afternoons last so long and old age goes so fast," with an L1/L2/L3 three-layer model of time perception.
5. Free will: not an illusion, but the A network's navigational capacity, measurable through the work-heat ratio.
The framework makes refutable predictions (for instance a quantitative relation between consciousness intensity and integration, and the clinical correspondence of the six failure modes). It is not a redescription of known phenomena, and it is not a metaphor. If any prediction is refuted, the framework must be revised.
The perceptual system projects environmental information into conscious content. Vision, hearing, touch — the ascending pathways of sensory data form the "input layer" of the conscious stage.
A self-referential narrative generator. Memory, reflection, language — weaving discrete events into a coherent self-story, producing the temporal continuity of "I."
The constant undertone of interoceptive signals. Heartbeat, breath, visceral sensations — the body state's pervasive coloring of consciousness, determining the texture and intensity of emotion.
Attention as a resource allocation engine. Selective amplification, inhibition, switching — determining which content enters the conscious focus, controlling the distribution of cognitive bandwidth.