The Judge-Adjudication Model of Consciousness: Self-Reference as a History of Precision Assignments

Consciousness is often treated as a property of the brain's instantaneous information processing, but this 'snapshot' approach fails to explain the feeling of mineness and temporal continuity in experience. The Judge-Adjudication Model (JAM) proposes that consciousness is a dynamic structure: the Judge is a self-referential precision-weighting mechanism that selects among parallel algorithmic candidates, and adjudication assigns high precision to one candidate, rendering it 'my experience.' The self is defined as the history of these adjudications accumulated over time, encoded in synaptic weights and default mode network connectivity. JAM generates five falsifiable predictions about neural signatures of conscious access, anesthetic state transitions, and decodable individual differences from resting-state fMRI, and is distinguished from other theories by placing the historical construction of the self at consciousness's core.

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Abstract

Consciousness is often theorized as a property of the brain's instantaneous information-processing architecture. We argue that this "snapshot" approach systematically fails to account for the feeling of mineness and temporal continuity that characterize conscious experience. We propose the Judge-Adjudication Model (JAM), in which consciousness is a dynamic structure: the Judge is a self-referential precision-weighting mechanism that selects among parallel algorithmic candidates, and adjudication is the act of assigning high precision to one candidate, thereby rendering it "my experience." The self is defined as the history of these adjudications accumulated over time, physically encoded in synaptic weights and default mode network connectivity. JAM generates five falsifiable predictions regarding neural signatures of conscious access, anesthetic state transitions, and decodable individual differences from resting-state fMRI. We systematically distinguish JAM from Global Workspace, Integrated Information, Higher-Order Thought, and Active Inference theories, demonstrating that only JAM places the historical construction of the self at the constitutive core of consciousness.