Organizational transitions in awareness: a framework of access, coordination, and regulation

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.

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Abstract

Consciousness research often uses overlapping terms such as consciousness, awareness, conscious access, subjective experience, reportability, selfhood, and metacognition. This conceptual compression can make it difficult to distinguish different awareness-related processes or to identify which capacities are preserved, disrupted, or restored across altered states. This paper proposes an organizational framework for distinguishing awareness processes in terms of constrained access, representational coordination, adaptive regulation, and recursive self-modeling. The framework distinguishes three related but partially separable organizational conditions: biological regulation, integrated experiential awareness, and recursive self-modeling. Here, partially separable means that these organizational conditions may overlap and interact while nevertheless exhibiting different patterns of degradation, persistence, or recovery under perturbation. Biological regulation refers to adaptive control and responsiveness that need not involve stable experiential organization. Integrated experiential awareness refers to first-order experiential organization in which sensory, interoceptive, affective, and contextual information is coordinated and stabilized across time. Recursive self-modeling refers to the capacity of a system to represent aspects of its own internal, evaluative, or behavioral states across time. The central hypothesis is that these conditions may show ordered vulnerability across perturbation and recovery. Recursive self-modeling should often be more vulnerable than integrated first-order experiential organization under conditions such as sleep onset, anesthesia, dissociation, depersonalization, neurological disruption, and other altered states, and should often re-emerge later during recovery. This prediction does not require sharp thresholds or fixed natural boundaries. Instead, the proposed conditions are treated as graded transition zones within a multidimensional organizational landscape. The framework is positioned as an organizational crosswalk rather than a replacement for existing theories. Its aim is to clarify relationships between biological regulation, experiential organization, metacognitive accessibility, and recursive self-related processing while generating testable predictions for consciousness research.