Dynamic Integrated Consciousness Theory

A review proposes Dynamic Integrated Consciousness Theory (DIC) to explain why some monitoring becomes reportable awareness while other monitoring remains local or behavior-guiding. DIC separates five typed burdens: organized self-reference (C1), global availability (C2), within-episode renewal (C3), competition-sensitive commitment (C4), and reflexive policy modeling over the selector itself (C5). Basic functional awareness requires a C1-C4-positive profile plus time-bounded co-occurrence of online self-indexing and long-range broadcast. Meta-conscious awareness adds selector-level revision of why the current selection policy produced the chosen content. The review licenses each burden through paired healthy/intact and damaged/perturbed evidence, presenting DIC as a falsifiable mechanistic scaffold rather than a metaphysics of phenomenal feel.

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Abstract

Abstract Why does some monitoring become reportable awareness while other monitoring remains local or behaviour-guiding? Dynamic Integrated Consciousness Theory (DIC) synthesizes evidence from intact, lesioned, perturbed, anaesthetized, sleep-state, and disorders-of-consciousness studies into a mechanistic scaffold for this transition. It separates five typed burdens: organized self-reference (C1), global availability (C2), within-episode renewal (C3), competition-sensitive commitment (C4), and reflexive policy modelling over the selector itself (C5; “rapid causality” is retained only as historical shorthand). Basic functional awareness is proposed to require a C1-C4-positive profile plus time-bounded co-occurrence of online self-indexing and long-range broadcast. Meta-conscious awareness adds selector-level revision of why the current selection policy produced the chosen content. The review licenses each burden through paired healthy/intact and damaged/perturbed evidence where available, and presents DIC as a falsifiable mechanistic scaffold rather than as a metaphysics of phenomenal feel. The accompanying open-data package translates the hypotheses into auditable pilot tests.