Building the Blocks of Being: The Attributes and Qualities Required for Consciousness

Consciousness requires specific cognitive building blocks, including perceptive, computational, and meta-representational capacities. Each attribute is strictly necessary for consciousness to emerge, and the framework applies to human, organic, artificial, and organizational entities. Some intuitively necessary attributes are neither required nor sufficient. The building blocks constitute a meta-theory for classifying consciousness, not a theory of consciousness itself.

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Abstract

For consciousness to exist, an entity must have prerequisite characteristics and attributes to give rise to it. We explore these “building blocks” of consciousness in detail in this paper, which range from perceptive to computational to meta-representational characteristics of an entity’s cognitive architecture. We show how each cognitive attribute is strictly necessary for the emergence of consciousness, and how the building blocks may be used for any entity to be classified as being conscious. The list of building blocks is not limited to human or organic consciousness and may be used to classify artificial and organisational conscious entities. We further explore a list of attributes that seem intuitively necessary for consciousness, but on further investigation, are neither required nor sufficient. The building blocks do not represent a theory of consciousness but rather a meta-theory on the emergence and classification of consciousness.