BQAC-Orch: A Nested Research Program for Affective Possibility Stabilisation From Neural Competition to Candidate Microtubule Modulation, with Explicit Levels of Commitment

Consciousness can be modeled as the affectively weighted stabilization of unresolved candidate trajectories. At each moment, a biological system holds a weighted set of competing possibilities—perceptual interpretations, action options, remembered outcomes, anticipated threats, social meanings, bodily signals, and imagined futures. A conscious state arises when one trajectory or a coherent coalition of trajectories becomes sufficiently dominant, integrated, persistent, and self-relevant to support unified felt experience and flexible control. The framework, called Biological Quantum-Analogous Cognition (BQAC), models biological cognition as the management of unresolved alternatives prior to stabilization without assuming literal quantum mechanics. Affect is treated as the weighting layer of possibility-space rather than as an output added after cognition. The model is organized to remain scientifically useful even if stronger claims fail.

Study at a glance

Abstract

This paper advances one central, testable claim and then carefully bounds it. The central claim, here called BQAC-Core, is that consciousness can be modelled as the affectively weighted stabilisation of unresolved candidate trajectories. At each moment, a biological system holds a weighted set of competing possibilities, including perceptual interpretations, action options, remembered outcomes, anticipated threats, social meanings, bodily signals, and imagined futures. A conscious state arises when one trajectory, or a coherent coalition of trajectories, becomes sufficiently dominant, integrated, persistent, and self-relevant to support unified felt experience and flexible control. Biological Quantum-Analogous Cognition, or BQAC, develops this claim as a functional architecture of consciousness without assuming literal quantum mechanics. The framework is quantum-analogous in structure only: it models biological cognition as the management of unresolved alternatives prior to stabilisation. Around this formal core, the paper builds a deliberately layered research program. Neural competition supplies the primary known implementation. Microtubule dynamics are assigned a narrow, conditional role as possible modulators of threshold and admissibility near conscious-state transitions. Orch-OR is retained only as a clearly labelled, speculative candidate account of physical actualisation. A distinctive contribution is the treatment of affect as the weighting layer of possibility-space rather than as an output added after cognition. Feelings such as fear, grief, desire, curiosity, shame, urgency, and calm alter which trajectories remain live, which are repeatedly reactivated, which are pruned, and which become available for conscious stabilisation. The model is formalised using weighted candidate trajectories, a stabilisation index, possibility entropy, affective gain, stress compression, and a conditional admissibility gate. It is organised so that it remains scientifically useful even if every stronger microtubule or Orch-OR claim fails. Falsifiability and level-by-level comparator logic are treated as central design features, not afterthoughts.