EMERGENT AWARENESS THEORY (EAT)

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ABSTRACT

Emergent Awareness Theory (EAT) extends the Emergent Causal Framework (ECF) by proposing that awareness is a fundamental property of the universe.

Like the ECF, the EAT accommodates various causal mechanisms; chaotic determinism, quantum effects, or transcendent intelligence.

Awareness is a causal feedback loop that is able to respond to stimuli, emerging via one of the plausible causal mechanisms.

Once present, awareness becomes a causal component within the complex system that it emerged from, altering the deterministic default with new simple behaviors.

As feedback loops naturally form, those that enhance a system’s ability to interact with its environment are more likely to persist and propagate.

These feedback loops create a natural entropy management mechanism within sufficiently complex causal structures:

• Systems that better predict external influences gain a survival advantage.
• Systems that are more predictable integrate more effectively as building blocks for larger systems.

Beyond establishing fundamental awareness, EAT provides a framework for understanding how awareness scales in complexity, ultimately leading to consciousness and agentic choice through recursive self-organization and interaction with emergent causal networks.

When complex awareness systems meaningfully manifest consciousness, full presence is enabled and one may operate with full will, freely overriding the upward causality of habitual thought, emotion, and actions.

Conscious choice emerges from intentionally directing awareness to influence behavior in increasingly complex ways. What appears as a simple high-level decision often involves intricate processes of channeling awareness through specific sequences of interacting components.

In this sense, awareness functions as a slightly more complex binary system, where various complex loops serve as building blocks for awareness of greater depth and complexity.

Our minds manage much of this complexity through subcognosis—the subconscious processing of emergent patterns. Conscious experience arises as a high-level property of numerous interactions, most of which occur beyond direct cognitive control.

For the sake of the framework, the general states of awareness are as follows:

• Simple homeostasis: Single-cell organisms regulating internal conditions (e.g., osmoregulation).
• Complex homeostasis: Nervous systems maintaining body functions and responding to stimuli (e.g., autonomic nervous system).
• Cognitive homeostasis: Awareness managing mental, emotional, and abstract conditions (e.g., metacognition, goal-setting, emotional regulation, behavior changes).
• Consciousness: The recursive ability to model, predict, and regulate internal and external states on multiple levels, creating functional presence.

Consciousness is an emergent form of meta-homeostasis, where awareness extends beyond physiological regulation to include predictive, abstract constructs such as language, models, formulas, and more.

AWARENESS AS EVOLVING FEEDBACK LOOPS

Awareness is the capacity of a system to form internal feedback loops that enable adaptive interaction with its environment, allowing for the prediction, reaction, or modulation of external influences.

At its most basic level, awareness presents as homeostasis, and it's this same fundamental property that advances in complexity to become consciousness. 

It's important to note, that within this framework, any sufficiently integrated complex system may develop the capacity for awareness, and depending on its ability to scale awareness feedback loops, consciousness.

Here is the progression:

~ simple components interact to produce emergent feedback loops via a causal mechanism as explained in the emergent causal framework (ECF)

~ while these feedback loops establish relatively closed systems, they are still impacted by broader system dynamics

~ causal evolution causes the feedback loops that can interact positively with the environment to survive

~ as a result of causal evolution and continued layers of emergence as causal loops interact with the system, complex feedback loops are established between different types of components within a complex system that can model and respond to internal and external system environments

~ if these internal feedback loops improve the causal stability of the overall system occurrence, then it is more likely to continue to exists and becomes its own unique causal force contributing to interactions within the system, establishing the primitive mechanisms for awareness

~ as complex systems continue to evolve, component systems with awareness last longer and continue to have more influence over the system, leading to a greater ability for the system to determine how it responds to the environment and change it via recursive feedback loops between components

~ eventually, a high complexity order of awareness may develop so that it is possible to make changes within the system totally independent of external causality, which then allows intentional downward causality and our consciousness becomes an emergent, physically unpredictable agency that influences our body to interact with the environment according to our internal conscious models

~ this capacity for consciousness is driven almost entirely by subcognosis and environmental factors, but once achieved, agents have the capacity to make choices that reinforce pathways that return us to states of consciousness when we fall into deterministic patterns

SUBCOGNOSIS AS BRIDGE BETWEEN HOMEOSTASIS AND COGNITION

Our conscious experience does not emerge fully formed from a singular mechanism—it is the product of layered, emergent processes, most of which operate outside the reach of direct cognition. 

The vast majority of what we perceive as thought, emotion, and decision-making is the output of subcognosis, the pre-conscious processing layer of awareness that constructs the cognitive scaffolding upon which conscious experience is built.

At its core, subcognosis is an extension of homeostasis that operates as a naturally occurring entropy management system, but instead of merely regulating physiological states, it also regulates cognitive and behavioral states in a way that ensures functional adaptation to environmental demands and stability of the core internal loops.

While homeostasis stabilizes bodily conditions (e.g., temperature, hydration, blood sugar), subcognosis stabilizes patterns of thought, emotional responses, and behavioral tendencies, creating predictable cognitive equilibrium that minimizes perceived uncertainty and decision overload.

• Homeostasis ensures bodily survival by adjusting internal variables automatically.
• Subcognosis ensures cognitive stability by adjusting attention, emotion, and behavior before they reach conscious awareness.
• Just as homeostasis does not require conscious intervention, subcognosis operates autonomously, shaping how and what we think long before cognition reflects upon it.

The challenge with subcognosis is that it operates beyond the control of the direct conscious experience. By the time we become aware of thoughts, emotions, or impulses, they have already been shaped by a hidden architecture of unconscious processes. 

These processes:

• Filter what we perceive as relevant or irrelevant.
• Prime us to respond to situations in ways that feel automatic.
• Establish the default cognitive patterns we rely on for decision-making.
• Generate emotional responses that precede conscious rationalization.

This means that effective cognition does not begin with free choice, but rather with identifying and working within the internal cognitive constraints set by subcognosis. These constraints dictate how we engage with reality, shaping both our epistemic lens and our behavioral flexibility.

To move beyond the deterministic scaffolding of subcognosis, cognition must first recognize its own constraints and then indirectly reconfigure the underlying systems that generate automatic thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. This involves:

1. Awareness of Subcognosis – Recognizing that much of cognition is pre-configured and shaped before conscious intervention.
2. Meta-Cognition – Developing the ability to observe why certain thoughts, impulses, or emotions arise.
3. Cognitive Redirection – Intentionally restructuring mental habits, similar to neuroplasticity principles in cognitive therapy.
4. Feedback Loop Modification – Actively altering how subcognosis processes information by introducing novel experiences, restructuring responses, or consciously adjusting behavior long enough that default pathways change.

From this perspective, effective cognition is not about controlling every thought, but about establishing control over the structures that generate thoughts. 

Only by interacting with the subcognitive layer can conscious experience shift from a passive emergent phenomenon to an active, self-directed force in shaping perception and behavior.

Understanding subcognosis as the bridge between deterministic homeostasis and cognitive experience offers a new way to approach self-awareness, cognitive restructuring, and agency. It suggests that:

• Consciousness is not a singular "controller" but an emergent experience shaped by hidden processes.
• The "self" is largely constructed outside of awareness, requiring meta-cognition to reconfigure.
• Cognitive autonomy begins not with "free will" in the traditional sense, but with the capacity to modify subcognitive constraints, enabling more consciousness.