Consciousness Is Deployed Intelligence: What a Computational Theory of Consciousness Must Explain

Abstract

Debates over whether consciousness is computational often leave the proposed computation unclear. This paper separates five phenomena that are regularly run together: intelligence, conscious deployment, the composite sensory movie, selfhood and qualia. Discrimination, prediction and control can proceed automatically, so intelligence alone is not enough. The theory identifies consciousness with a change in how intelligence is organised. When routine competence is inadequate, or deliberate purpose intervenes, relevant learned capacities are brought into a temporarily unified and manipulable self/world model. Possible continuations of that model can then govern attention, thought and action. Opening transfers authority; maintenance turns a trigger into an episode. Surprise provides a reason to investigate but cannot supply a distinction or skill that the system has never learned. Meaning depends on anticipated consequences for the continuing self. The proposal is neither a claim to have modelled the whole of consciousness nor a claim that software execution proves phenomenality. Its contribution is a specific functional identity thesis with explicit causal seams: recruitment can be disconnected from extra compute, simulation from governance, opening from maintenance, and deployment from later automaticisation. A theory stated at those seams can be challenged one link at a time rather than protected by overall behavioural success.