More Than Computation, Made of Computation: Free Modelling as a Necessary Condition, and a Self-Model That Takes Itself for Its Bearer

Abstract

Is there more to consciousness than computation? This paper answers yes, and locates the extra ingredient in computation itself: a second-order regime in which a system's modelling takes its own modelling as an object, run by a self-model that takes itself for the being it models. The account rests on two claims. The enabling claim is a necessity: consciousness requires free modelling, open-ended computation that the system recruits for its own world- and self-models, such that a feedforward model of matched capacity trained on the same history falls behind it on novel input as compositional depth grows. In cortex, free modelling usually shows as near-critical dynamics, and the state-transition literature on anaesthesia, sleep, seizure and disorders of consciousness records that signature; the relation runs from free modelling to the signature, so a near-critical cortex can be unconscious and a subcritical system conscious, and criticality data corroborate the account without testing it. The constitutive claim says what experience is: information from the system's implicit models is integrated into its explicit models and fed to an explicit self-model that takes the modelled self for the subject. On the computationalism–implementationism axis the theory is computationalist: what makes a system conscious is the form of computation it runs, and the neural signature is a contingent trace of that computation in one substrate. The paper states the falsifier for the necessity claim, a matched-capacity novel-input probe, and shows the account's consistency with integrated world-modelling and recursive self-modelling frameworks.