Consciousness as Bounded Valenced Integrated Control

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This preprint advances a human-centered identity-emergence framework for consciousness. It proposes that, in humans and similar embodied organisms, consciousness is the first-person lived form of bounded, valenced, integrated organism-level control. The framework is built around Bounded Valenced Integrated Control (BVIC): a conscious biological system is understood as one whose continued integrity matters to its own regulation, whose internal and external states are affectively weighted, whose subsystems are dynamically integrated into a unified control frame, and whose action-guiding states remain available as its own perspective. The paper argues that the hard problem is partly misframed when it assumes affect-neutral processing and then asks why feeling is added. Instead, human consciousness is treated as emerging through evolutionary and developmental layering of homeostasis, nociception, affect, interoception, perception, memory, attention, self-modeling, and flexible action. The manuscript introduces SMII as a provisional structural heuristic for conscious unity and degradation, distinguishes conscious unity from signal complexity, reframes qualia as perspectival sensory-control states, and explores implications for animal consciousness, artificial consciousness, and AI alignment, especially the distinction between functional care and phenomenal care. This manuscript is presented as a conceptual framework for further criticism, refinement, mathematical formalization, and empirical development, not as a completed experimental theory.