Consciousness as Bounded Valenced Integrated Control
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) June 3, 2026 Filip Belciug
Consciousness in humans and similar embodied organisms is the first-person lived form of bounded, valenced, integrated organism-level control, according to this conceptual framework. The framework, called Bounded Valenced Integrated Control (BVIC), holds that a conscious biological system's continued integrity matters to its own regulation, its states are affectively weighted, its subsystems are dynamically integrated, and its action-guiding states remain available as its own perspective. The hard problem is partly misframed when it assumes affect-neutral processing and then asks why feeling is added.