Organizational transitions in awareness: a framework of access, coordination, and regulation
Frontiers in Psychology July 29, 2026 Alison King, Darryl Gray
Consciousness research often conflates distinct processes like consciousness, awareness, and metacognition, making it hard to determine which capacities are preserved or disrupted in altered states. This paper proposes an organizational framework distinguishing three partially separable conditions: biological regulation (adaptive control without stable experience), integrated experiential awareness (coordinated sensory and affective experience), and recursive self-modeling (representing one's own internal states). The central hypothesis is that these conditions show ordered vulnerability across perturbation and recovery: recursive self-modeling is more vulnerable than integrated experiential awareness under sleep onset, anesthesia, dissociation, or neurological disruption, and re-emerges later during recovery. These conditions are treated as graded transition zones within a multidimensional landscape, offering testable predictions without requiring sharp boundaries.