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The H I Theory of Conscious Awareness.
John Cochrane Jan-Sep 2025
This theory considers the evolution of basic sensory capabilities into what we experience as conscious awareness. Although the general principle of evolutionary steps producing increasing complexity over time, this theory extends this to include the capabilities provided by the Neocortex.
Four Theories.
This theory is the third of four theories that address different aspects of human consciousness.
The four theories are largely independent, in the sense that each addresses a different aspect of consciousness and do not rely strongly on each other. Each theory contributes, subject to verification, to an overall understanding of the function and experience of human consciousness.
Each of the theories are broadly compatible with the Global Workspace Theory and/or similar theories that approach consciousness through the processes apparent in the brain as a whole. The theories are also broadly relatable to the Thousand Brains Model of intelligence as well as modern hemispheric research and theories.
Self-Awareness.
We all experience self-awareness whilst we are conscious. But, we do not have a deeper experiential understanding of what consciousness actually is. This lack of deeper understanding means that we find it difficult to describe consciousness as well as struggling to define the actual processes that go on in our brains that produce consciousness.
This theory attempts to define conscious awareness as an continuously emerging quality derived from relatively understandable evolutionary roots.
Simulation Layers.
Although the stepwise descriptions in this theory represent evolutionary development of increasing capability it is worth noting that all of these are, I suggest, still in action. Each advance in capability involves simulations and modelling to give increasingly sophisticated representations of our internal stats and our externally sensed environment.
Each evolutionary step builds on what has gone before but no single evolutionary step actually replaces previous steps. All of these layers of sensory simulation are potentially still present, all have continued to evolve in terms of capability, and all contribute to our experience of our own consciousness.
Light-Detection.
I suggest a starting point of processes that are subconscious and which supported the evolution of perceptive vision.
Early vision provided the detection of light and dark. This base-level of vision could be used to support nocturnal or diurnal behaviours or movement preferences into or out of open spaces.
Pattern-Recognition.
As vision became more advanced, an increasingly complex nervous system could allow for simple pattern-recognition representations of shapes, movements, and even spatial simulation.
When combined with memory, or hard-wired preferences, vision could be used to identify potential sources of safety, food, and companions. Vision could also then be used to identify potential threats.
Of course, all senses would inevitably be used to improve the presence of both threats and opportunities.All this could be done as an automatic set of processes.
Attention.
The next easily identifiable progression that I suggest in the evolution of consciousness is attention.
As senses improved, offering more detail and greater sensitivity, so the signal-processing capabilities would also become more and more complex. The increasing sophistication of pattern-recognition would become more and more dependent on various types of internal simulation.
Simulations are not just attempts to model an environment, they also give the potential for predicting the future. Attention is, I suggest, the process of assessing and evaluating the meaning of sensory detection. Attention builds on automatic pattern-recognition by adding layers of evaluation and, at the same time, applying a continuing evaluation and study of the environment. Attention directs our sensory process to obtain reliable and detailed information whilst also confirming particular opportunities and threats.
Experientially, attention could be described as noticing.
Concentrated-Attention.
In terms of consciousness, an important attribute of attention is the conversion of recognised opportunities and threats into possible actions. The evaluation of attention in this way can become the executive manager of both sensory evaluation and behavioural response. Of course, one behaviour is to increase sensory focus on items of interest, to increase attention into concentrated-attention.
It seems likely to me that a simple duplication of concentrated-attention into an opportunity-seeking part and a threat-avoiding part would be useful. Each of these functional parts would perform its own assessment of pattern-recognition, meaning-assignment, and preferred or required action. These two streams of concentration would be ‘judged’ by a shared process of attention and a suitable behavioural response selected.
I suggest that this flexibility of concentrated-attention matches our experience of consciousness working dynamically. Attention varies in intensity and subject from moment to moment, varying according to the current situation and the predictions being made.
Experientially, concentrated-attention could be described as a basis for curiosity.
Self-Awareness.
Although attention and concentration as described so far could be imagined as totally automatic processes, they provide the potential for the next step which is awareness.
The management of the dual-stream processing into appropriate behaviours to take advantage of opportunities whilst avoiding potential and actual threats offers the first manifestation of self-awareness. A capability that can emerge from increasing layers and streams of processing, evaluating, and the choosing of optimal action.
Awareness can be thought of as a deepening of the management of the processing through the continuous self-regulation of the simulations, representations, and evaluations. The ability of a brain to simulate and produce meaningful representations of reality can be used to provide self-awareness through a monitoring of the processing already going on in the brain.
Self-awareness, which presumably could be achieved in a number of ways, improves upon the capabilities associated with concentrated-attention. Self-awareness, or self-simulation, provides a means to observe and manage the internal mental processing that drives behaviour.
Experientially, self-awareness can include an appreciation of our current state of being (interoception) as well as an appreciation of what is not ‘us’.
Intelligence.
The Thousand Brains Model of Intelligence describes how Cortical Columns of neurons in the Neocortex can explain complex processing of sensory and other data to produce general intelligence.
I describe general intelligence as our capacity to learn and to apply our learning resourcefully. Learning is based on memory, intellect, and understanding. Resourcefulness requires ingenuity, adaptability, and various other forms of creativity.
Intelligence, in its many forms, feeds our consciousness with high-level sensory and interpretive data. Our human consciousness depends upon the evolutionary development of the Neocortex.
Following the proposals of the Thousand Brains Model, our human consciousness, in effect, depends upon the evolutionary development of the Neocortex.
Curiosity.
Curiosity, it seems to me, contributes vitally to consciousness, and all forms of mental awareness.
Curiosity provides a motivational foundation for awareness and converts simple awareness into attention.
Curiosity drives natural learning and the experimentation that promotes continued life-long learning. Hence, curiosity is vital to long-term adaptability and short-term resourcefulness.
Curiosity seems essential to personal thought, self-reflective thought that is perhaps at the centre of Core Consciousness.
Curiosity also seems key to internal mental resolutions of conflicts between different motivational influences, including feelings, emotions, compulsion, imperatives, and intellectual observations. As a functional observation, curiosity might be considered to act as a bridge between sensory and intelligent processing and Core Consciousness.
While curiosity seems vital to consciousness it is not yet clear, to me, whether curiosity is an intellectual capability, and hence not part of Core Consciousness, or whether it should be included as part of the definition of Core Consciousness. My own experience of curiosity is that it seems to feed into consciousness rather than to arise from conscious deliberations, even though I can also experience curiosity when I choose to direct my focus of attention onto a specific object or topic.
Emergent Consciousness Versus Conscious Narrative.
There seem to be two basic proposals for the way that consciousness works. One is that a complex brain produces consciousness as an emergent quality and the other suggests consciousness is based on a form of narrative process, or story-telling.
I suggest in this theory that both processes, working together, are involved in our experience of consciousness.
General intelligence produced in our Neocortex provides complex heavily-parallel processing which feeds our consciousness with sophisticated simulations, interpretations, and predictions representing current reality. Our core consciousness converts these inputs to form a single conscious narrative representing our focus of conscious attention.
I suggest that consciousness is an ‘emergent’ quality in the sense that it is dependent on the complexity of our processing-ability, evolved over time.
It is also dependent on the evolution of increasingly complex behavioural abilities and the characteristics that support those abilities. These characteristics include complex communication and language, various types of memory, multi-layered simulations of external realities and internal processes, and awareness’s that can be activated and suppressed.
Adult human consciousness is not, I suggest, a single simple process but is the interaction of many processes that are expressed, through some form of language-processing, as a self-consistent storyline. What we call consciousness is extremely variable and can manifest in many forms but we only experience it when we have a storyline of time-based events that uses short-term (working) memory to give us a high-level comprehension of our current situation.
Consciousness is our overall interpretation of reality as applied to our ‘selves’ and experienced as an ongoing ‘reality’. Consciousness is basically a feedback loop involving our awareness over time of our own process of observation, simulation, planning, and choosing actions.
In evolutionary terms, consciousness is an outcome of the continued development of more and more sophisticated behaviour. That behaviour includes a sense of self as well as non-self, ‘us’ in a particular context of ‘life’.
Our experience of consciousness is complex but is based on processes of thinking about how to engage, or apply, self to non-self through our behavioural action.
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