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Critique and Revision of A Unifying Principle Diagram
Based on Raymond de Lacaze‘s post at https://infobiotecnologia.blogspot.com/2026/06/from-void-to-mind-universe-as-process.html I made some revisions to illustrate the Multisense Realism view. I borrowed some of the generated graphic and design elements that he used and added a few of my own from Chat GPT.
What I am illustrating are the following similarities and differences:
Lacaze’s diagram describes “The Unifying Principle”, whereby “energy” becomes “information” by organizing. In his view, self-organizing energy generates complexity, which then evolves from universe to life to mind/consciousness by adding more and more complexity. It is complexity, he says, that “gives rise to awareness, reflection, and understanding (consciousness)”.
My view under MSR can also be used to describe a flow of a single self-evolving phenomenon, however, I propose that this phenomenon was never a ‘void’ or ‘potential’, nor could it have ever unconsciously informed, ordered, or defined that order as complex. Such qualities are all conscious reactions to consciously experienced aesthetic qualities. Unconscious phenomena, if they could even exist, would be devoid of aesthetic qualities or reactions to them. There would be nothing to see/feel/know or care whether those appearances seem simple or complex, orderly or chaotic, informative or semantically inert. To me, it makes more sense to consider the possibility that the universe was always and only a single, eternal “here and now” of conscious experience in which all phenomena are presented as irreducibly aesthetic and participatory appearances.
Within that Totality or Holos of aesthetic presentations, different variations and versions of the Holos are diffracted or graphed through the modulation of limited insensitivity. Unbounded sense and motive is the thesis, masking by insensitivity (entropy and negentropy are the antithesis of sensitivity), to arrive at a synthesis of conscious experience that are aesthetically saturated (high Significance, proprietary, unique) and desaturated (low Significance, generic, repetitive). In other words, by winnowing down the eternal Now by temporarily allowing only partial access to sense modalities and participatory power, experiences such as mortality and time are made possible as additions within the Totality. Human experience, as well as other types of biologically constrained experience are only some examples of a much larger spectrum of awareness that extends well beyond human scales and modalities of sensitivity. From the human perspective, non-human consciousness appears as zoological or supernatural. Everything else appears as figures and forms on biological, geological, chemical, or astrophysical scales.
What Multisense Realism (MSR) suggests is that these forms are actually only iconic sensory snapshots that retain only those details that minimally overlap across scales and modes of sensory-motor access. We seeing objects, and we are seen as an object, but both the ability to see and the objects that appear in our vision are not objects, they are percepts. Objects are generated by, for, and within perception, not the other way around. Objects can’t bind to percepts or concepts, they can only really do one thing: Change each other’s shape and movement with their own shape and movement. Forces, fields, energy, charge, waves, and other scientific concepts describe only different aspects of when and how those changes to shape and motion occur. Nothing in science explains how geometric changes could begin to inform or allow any such thing as experiences with aesthetic qualities such as order or complexity to emerge. Geometry does not contain any formula to transcend geometry, nor can it without assuming such transcendence as a foregone conclusion from circular reasoning.
Under MSR it is not the body or system that is conscious, it is consciousness that renders itself as having bodies (or cells, molecules, planets, galaxies) or other systemic appearances (math, language, logic, intuition) through a process that I call eigenmorphism and diffractivity. Together, the Aesthetic thesis or Holos and the Anesthetic antithesis or ‘Graphing process’ yield a subtractive synthesis of limited conscious experience, such as the experience of mortality or human personal awareness.
In my cannibalized diagram, I use various prefixes, Holo-, Meta-, hemi-, and sema- to refer to scales of awareness that are beyond and beneath direct personal participation. The scale that is proposed here, then is one that begins with Total awareness (Holophoric Consciousness) nested into multiple subordinated scales and modalities of awareness (Transpersonal and Interpersonal = Metaphoric Consciousness, Personal or individual scales = Phoric Consciousness with Morphic Appearances, and Subpersonal or Impersonal scales = Semaphoric/Hemimorphic Appearances).
The Lacaze view, by contrast, posits consciousness as an end result of a linear process that presumably takes place in the absence of all conscious experience and aesthetic appearances, including any capacity to discern ‘things’ from nothingness, or to care about any such discernments. This, while being the most popular view is, in my understanding, impossible and self-negating. Potential isn’t a necessary phenomenon since consciousness can create appearances of potential or void by invoking various features of masking or insensitivity. Through the partial amnesia of sleep states we are able to sculpt out a sense of successive experiences in linear time. Forgetting and remembering work together to limit our focus and cultivate an appreciation for the significance of each set of aesthetic presentations and how they might relate to each other. I reject the premise of an ontological entity that exists by virtue of its own pure non-existence/void or pure existence-to-be/potential and understand all appearances of void or potential to be artifacts of how subordinated conscious experiences perceive their own limitation relative to themselves and to the Totality. Nothingness, as I like to say, can only ever be something’s idea of the absence of everything. In an absolute sense, there are only conscious experiences of greater and lesser access to the Totality.
Next in the chain, Lacaze points to Energy as being the first thing to be realized out of the pre-realized context of void/potential. I have talked previously about how the term energy is used in other writing on the Multisense Realism site, and while I make no claim of expertise in physical theory, I do think that I understand enough to say that energy ultimately appears to be an abstract concept that reduces to geometry. Energy is the geometry of non-inertial movement of some material substance (concrete objects or shapes…particles, waves) in public space. I find that even those who are experts in physical theory disagree with each other or admit ignorance about what ‘energy’ is, what its powers actually are, and even whether it exists as a concrete ontological presence or an abstract heuristic concept. Because the authority of physical theory ultimately derives from parsimony, it makes sense to me to discard any vague extensions to what energy could be or do as metaphysical speculation. Metaphysical speculation is fine, it just has no business underpinning theoretical physics or assuming academic authority based on associations with physics that are suggested rather than proved.
As far as I can see, energy need not be anything more concrete than the (conscious) observation of how material objects move each other around. Even quantum mechanics is ultimately nothing more than an elaborate algebraic metaphor for the changes in position of geometric appearances we detect with specialized material instruments. I don’t reject the idea of energy as an ontological entity, however, I suspect that it should be rejected in favor of the heuristic interpretation. Further, I suspect that what we call energy is ultimately an expression of conscious experiences intentionally participating in changing shared aesthetic qualities. Energy is a formula to predict the cascade of geometric-mechanical consequences that necessarily must appear from physical change instigated by conscious response to aesthetic stimulation. Energy is consciousness stepping on the accelerator or brakes or turning the steering wheel. If we do consider energy to be a concrete rather than abstract entity, I propose that the entity is a way of turning aesthetic responses (motive affect) to aesthetic stimulation (sense affect) into appearances of mechanical causality (motor effects).
I see Lecaze’s middle phases of the chain; Information, Order, and Complexity as being almost interchangeable semantically. They all refer to the same kind of thing – the clustering together of what I call aesthetic appearances, and their relation to each other and to logical modalities of sense-making within conscious experience. They don’t make sense outside of the assumption of conscious experience, without which nothing could be ‘informed’ in the first place. Unconsciousness can’t value one configuration over another as more orderly or complex. This is not a prejudice against unconsciousness, it is only a reminder that parsimony is a critical ingredient for any theory of everything that borrows its authority from association with established academic ‘hard’ science such as physics or computer science. Getting from energy to information is already impossible without assuming some unacknowledged capacity to inform and be informed that is somehow neither consciousness nor physical mechanism. As we move up the scale from physics to biology, we carried this unacknowledged assumption with us. Organs that we use to concentrate and amplify different types of sensitivity in our conscious experience became ‘sense organs’, as if organs were unconsciously sensing rather than organs being sense appearances in the first place.
Using Occam’s Razor, I see no reason to make a leap of emergent properties from mindless, automatic physical formation to semi-mindful, semi-participatory information. It’s a story that we have invented because of our mental experience of developing and using software, however software only exists for us, not for the hardware that we use to ‘run programs’ on. In reality, computer hardware no more runs software than an abacus does arithmetic or fingers count to ten. This projection of symbolic concepts onto percepts and then from percepts onto physical objects is so widely and deeply misunderstood that it literally undermines all of our efforts to understand consciousness and recognize its primacy. We mistake the local limitation of our own experience for limits of experience in general. This tends to lead us to one of two pathological conclusions – that consciousness arises accidentally out of the unperceived complexity of unconscious mechanism, or that the physical universe is an illusion with illusory mechanisms. With Multisense Realism, I attempt to explain why both extremes of mechanistic physicalism and solipsistic idealism negate themselves and how relativity, quantum mechanics, and transpersonal psychology hint at a larger continuum of conscious experience in which perspectives such as mechanism and solipsism appear as divergent biases of specialized awareness.
21st century madman’s picture of God
In/out : Electromotive-sensory force ::
Around and around : Gravitoentropic-Magnetic a-motive field
First Consciousness or Reality?
When answering the above question, please provide definitions for reality and consciousness because I’m not even sure I fully understand what they are. Thank you.
These are my understandings and should not be taken to constitute knowledge which is considered consensus science or philosophy. These are conjectures offered to inspire a deeper understanding into the nature of consciousness and reality.
Reality = Conscious experience in which relative qualities of realism are present. These qualities typically include persistence in memory, coherence, non-contradiction in causality, and shared pervasiveness, however we know that in a dream, even the most surreal conditions can be taken for reality. From this we can conclude that while on one level we believe that reality is based on qualities of realism, consciousness can be spoofed into assigning realistic qualities to any experience.
Logically we might think that the experience of waking up is what creates the difference between reality and dreaming, and that our waking life is simply a dream which we have not yet awakened from. There is another possibility, which is that our personal consciousness is part of a larger hierarchy or holarchy of conscious experiences, such that our sense of waking as being conscious of that which is finally and authentically real may be a sense which is as real as anything can ever be.
Consciousness = All that is not present in complete unconsciousness. We can use a lot of different terms to specify limits on this or that aspect of conscious experience. We can talk about awareness, perception, feeling, sensing, etc, or attention and being awake, being alive. In my view the point is not to make the subject more complicated but to distill it to its essence. We know what unconsciousness is. We know what general anesthesia is.
We can look at a term like ‘local anesthetic’ and see an intuitive connection between numbing of sensation and the annihilation of consciousness in general anesthesia. Between and opposing these poles, we can triangulate a term like ‘aesthesia’ or ‘aesthetic phenomena’ to refer to all that exists which is contingent upon the presence of direct presence of sensory perception and participation. Sense can be understood as the content of all experience, including thoughts and ideas, but not limited in any way to human beings, biology, or physical substances.
The point of a term like ‘aesthetic’ is to make a distinction between experiential phenomena which are indisputably concrete and anesthetic phenomena such as physical forms and logical functions (physics or information processing), which are, as far as we can ever know, hypothetical and abstract. We cannot know physics except by an indirect experience through our body and we cannot know information except by an indirect experience through our intellectual contemplation. Both of these are dependent upon conscious powers of perceptual participation and comparison.
To answer the OP question then, we must first completely sever any connection between consciousness, reality and the particular context of human beings so that consciousness as sense-perception/motive participation can be fairly considered alongside the other possibilities of physical mass-energy/space-time/force-field and information-theoretic form-functions/data-processes. If we fail to detach consciousness or qualia from the human experience then we are not comparing apples to apples. It would be like mistaking all forms of matter for parts of our physical body.
Next, we should see that there is no reality which cannot be dreamed. Lucid dreamers report that their dreams can be examined in excruciating detail and can contain experiences which are indistinguishable from waking reality. We should also leave the possibility open that even though our final reality could be a dream, it still could be different from any other dream. This difference could be an authentic sense that waking life is not any dream, but the only dream which is shared by all conscious experiences. It is the dream which counts more than all others because of its shared access, and because of the significance which is accumulated in a universe of experience which is felt so intensely for so many, for so long a time. I consider significance to be a concrete metaphysical feature – an aesthetic saturation which underlies both the privately impressive power of symbolic and archetypal phenomena and the publicly expressed power of energy, mass, matter and gravity.
Significance manifests tangibly as an arrest of motive effects, a slowing or marking of time and intensification of attention. The physical universe is a view of significance – the persistence of all experience as viewed from an anthropocentric scope of sensitivity/insensitivity. It is collection of many layers of limits of our human awareness which we see as the gaps between ourselves and our mind, brain, body, and universe of bodies. If our awareness were to expand to a transpersonal scope, we would appreciate directly that consciousness is not only a human phenomenon, but the only possible phenomenon which can make any and all other phenomena possible.
Without physics or information, we can still conceive of a universe of raw feelings, colors, sounds, etc. There could still be a dream in which things like matter or narrative activities could be present. Without consciousness/qualia, we can fool ourselves into thinking that a universe of Reality could ‘exist’ but when examined more carefully, our notion of ‘existence’ unravels into a purely abstract, faith-based concept which seems likely to me to be derived from our subjective sense of separation within consciousness rather than an objective sense of objectivity.
When we ask why something which we imagine has no experience, like a stone, it becomes a problem to rationally expect that any sort of experience should develop at all. A universe which is a physical machine cannot include immaterial feelings and thoughts without support from physics. A universe which is immaterial ‘simulation data’ also cannot include real aesthetic qualities other than the literal qualities which constitute each separate switch or branch in the data-processing substrate (be it material or otherwise). If we include conscious experiences as ‘emergent properties’ of either physics or information, we have become guilty of chasing our tail. Since the purpose of reducing our model of nature to a single phenomenon is to rationally explain every phenomenon with that single phenomenon, resorting to emergence amounts to inventing an unacknowledged second substance which has no rational connection to the first.
The solution to this in my view is to begin with the single phenomenon of sense (pan-aesthesia or pansensitivity) as the Absolute. From there, we get principles such as symmetry and reason with which to identify relations between physics and information as a Hegelian dialectic which reflects, rather than produces the original thesis of sense. Sense is the thesis, physics and information are the dual-aspect or double antithesis (antithesis of each other and of sense), significance is the synthesis, and entropy or insensitivity is the antithesis of the synthesis (the shadow of the thesis within the thesis). Because this quadruplicity is absolute, if we call it panpsychism we must be careful not to confuse it with what I call promiscuous panpsychism in which every thing, such as stones or signs have consciousness. Under pansensitivity, every “thing” is an appearance of consciousness within itself. We are not a body which has become conscious, we are a conscious experience which has foregrounded itself by back-grounding other conscious experiences as bodies.
In my view, a stone is what we see through the sense perspective of a human body in an anthropocentric timescale. In its native geological-astrophysical timescale, the events associated with the formation of minerals and planets are as dynamic and creative as biology or psychology. We see a stone because our sense of the experience which stretches back billions of years is frozen, relative to the scale of our own human experience. To us, it is a stone. Without us, there is no stone, only an aesthetic dream which speeds along at sampling rates too extreme for us to sense personally. The mineral level of experience is both too fast on the molecular level and too slow on the interstellar level for us to relate to directly.
The relation between a medium-rate human experience and an extreme-rate inorganic experience is presented as a truncated and collapsed aesthetic: as classical physics; density, mass, gravity, persistence of linear duration and causality, etc. Our human experience is nested within a deeper biological-zoological body experience, which is nested within a deeper organic-chemical experience, which is nested within a deeper inorganic-astrophysical experience.
Each of these nested ‘gears’ is concurrent with our own, even down to the Big Bang, which is eternally present as both an event in time and as the diffraction of sense into physical and psychological phenomena from beyond time. In this way, the Absolute is itself in ‘superposition’ of being sense experience which is becoming more significant sense experience by its diffraction as the physics vs information duality. This duality can be seen on the quantum scale as entanglement and contextuality. I think that entanglement is the parent of space and physics, since non-locality is a contrast against locality. For space or distance to exist, there must be a parallel, simultaneous relation which juxtaposes a non-local experience of ‘here’ with multiple experiences of ‘there, and there’. For time or causality to exist, there must be a serial contextuality in which a de-contextualized or immutable time-traveller is defined against the context of its ongoing mutable experience.
The physics-information duality shows up in relativity also as energy is defined in terms of spatiotemporalized mass (E = mc²). Energy, as the capacity to perform work is, in my view, the event horizon of conscious participation as it makes its teleological impact on what has been perceived. Energy is the footprint of subjectivity upon the subjective perception of objectivity, as it expresses the motive power to cause significant effects (or effect increasing significance). Gravity is the shadow of E = mc²…the significance-masking effect which we can conceive of as both physical entropy and information entropy. Gravity is the collapse of former significance in a given frame of reference which results in an increase in mass and aesthetic ‘seriousness’ of what remains.
To sum up: Reality is what consciousness finds serious and significant. It is a relation between the local frame of perception (such as a human lifetime) and the larger frames of reference in which that frame is nested (the history of the human species, zoology, biology, chemistry, physics, and metaphysics). In this relation the relative insignificance of the local frame is presented as a heightened quality of significance of the distal frames. We are thus presented with a way to use our limited consciousness to partially transcend its own limitation, by recognizing its own incompleteness as a material fact. This is ironic as it is the unbounded, absolute power of consciousness to transcend itself which gives rise to the nearly-absolute boundedness of realism into ‘Reality’. In other words, reality seems real because consciousness needs to become partially unreal to itself to create realism. Realism is the local appearance of phenomena beyond local appearance: Non-local consciousness (pansensitivity) as localized, decontextualed, de-sensitized, mechanics.
Reality is the way that consciousness creates the possibility of greater and greater enchantment through the appearance of disenchantment.
Compact Guide to Multisense Realism Cosmology
A compact guide to Multisense Realism.
On the top, we have the fundamental elements:
Ference: aka the Absolute, Fundamental awareness, Pansensitivity
The totality of all experience. Universal qualia. Simultaneous, eternal, and meta-ontological.
Afference: The division of ference into locally/sequentially felt qualities or affects. Sensations, feelings, perceptions, experiences, intuitions, local qualia, all fall into this category.
- Efference: The affect of motivation which causes effects to afferent frames of reference. Efference is reflected within externalized reference frames as mass-energy/space-time.
- Reference: Upon receipt of an effect by a frame of afference, attention is focused and informed by a reverberation of afferent associations that partially re-connect the local frame to the absolute.
Through many iterations of Afference – Efference – Afference – Reference, there is an accumulation of Significance. This is reflected in the bottom half of the image as the hierarchically stacked levels of phenomenal and physical contexts of experience.
Significance is the saturation of afference, such that significant affects are super-aesthetic and more directly revealing or reflecting aspects of the Absolute. Significance is afference returning to ference with interest.
The right hand side shows a hierarchy of typical human levels of significance. With the saturation of local qualia into subjectivity, there is an increasing complementary de-saturation as objectivity. This is shown on the left hand side. Note that the sense of causality proposed in MSR is multivalent. Unlike the top-down theistic models or bottom-up deterministic models, causality reverberates across reference frames horizontally as well as vertically.
Human consciousness is not caused by the human brain, rather human consciousness is a spectrum of active re-experience on biochemical, zoological, anthropological, and psychological levels. The brain is not caused by neurons or molecular structures, nor is it caused by the division of the single zygote into a body of organs. All physical structures are caused simultaneously by unseen consequences of re-experiences on multiple levels of description and scale. The key is timescale relativity. Every frame of reference is defined by its own scale of time relative to other frames.
What we see as molecular activity is taking place on a much faster and much slower scale than our own personal experience is. Cosmological events take place on the same scale of very fast and very slow relative to our scale. Human experience emerges* from the middle – cleaving the spectrum of scale into a larger-smaller polarities, again and again in a branching fractal pattern. Each branching creates new opportunities for significance, but also creates entropy which objectifies and distances other frames of afference.
Glossary of other Neologisms:
- Metaphoric = Transpersonal psychology, myth, intuition, timeless wisdom.
- Apophoric = “Away from” phoric. Thinking and analysis leverage a small amount of personal effort into communicable forms. The transpersonal and personal layers of experience are synthesized here as impersonal concepts and ideas.
- Phoric = The personal world of the self, ego, and autobiographical narrative,
- Emphoric = Personal feelings and emotions, instincts.
- Semaphoric = Sub-personal qualities of experience – sensations.
These levels constitute the hierarchy/spectrum of human subjectivity. In reality this is more of a dynamic fugue, with events on different levels taking on more or less significance than this static scale would suggest.
*actually human experience (thinking, feeling, perceiving, sensing) diverges or diffracts from the previous eras of simpler experience (anthro-, zoo-, bio-, organic, chemo-, fundamental)
What Is Really Real?
If everything we hear, touch, smell, see are electrical impulses interpreted by our brain, then what is real out there?
“founded a new school in which he taught fallibilism, namely that every object of human knowledge involves uncertainty. Thus, he argued, it is impossible ever to arrive at the knowledge of truth. It is related that he acted on his own principles, and carried his skepticism to such an extreme, that his friends were obliged to accompany him wherever he went, so he might not be run over by carriages or fall down precipices. It is likely, though, that these reports were invented by the Dogmatists whom he opposed. ” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
AI is Inside Out
The subjective world is an arena of sense that is surrounded by an unseen sensor. Unlike a computer, which finds its own data stored in precise and irreducibly knowable bits, we find our own introspection to be confoundingly mysterious. Both the interior and exterior world are presented to us as a natural given to be explored, but the methods of exploration are diametrically opposite. Penetrating the psyche leads to an examination of symbols that are both intensely personal as well as anthropologically universal.
Whether we explore the objective world or the subjective world, we do so from the inside out, as visitors in a universe that matters to us whether we like it or not. To understand how machine intelligence differs from natural consciousness, it is important to see that a machine’s world is taken rather than given. The machine’s world is assembled from the bottom up, through disconnected, instrumental samplings.
It can be argued that our sense of the world is also nothing more than a collection of readings taken by our sense organs, but if that were the case, we should not experience the outside world as a complete environment, but rather as a probabilistic blur that is punctuated by islands of known data. A machine’s view of the outside world should (and would) look like this:
This showed that even when shown millions of photos, the computer couldn’t come up with a perfect Platonic form of an object. For instance, when asked to create a dumbbell, the computer depicted long, stringy arm-things stretching from the dumbbell shapes. Arms were often found in pictures of dumbbells, so the computer thought that sometimes dumbbells had arms.
Similarly, images that have been probabilistically ‘reconstructed’ from fMRI data show the same incoherence:
These are images that have been simulated from the outside in – a mosaic of meaningless elements spread out over a canvas seen by no one. These are not the kinds of visions that we have when we encounter the depths of our own psyche, which are invariably spectacular, if surreal, dreamscapes. By contrast, these early machine models of visual encoding show us a soulless sub-realism made of digital gas; a Bayesian partlessness gliding arbitrarily toward programmed compartments.
Although a machine’s introspection need not have any visual appearance at all, it makes sense that if it did, what would be seen might look something like a debugger interface, full of detailed, unambiguous data about the state of the machine.
It would be bizarre to have a layer of all-but-incomprehensible fiction in between the machine and its own functions. Even if the dashboard of such a complex machine used a lot of compression techniques, surely that compression would not be a mystery to the machine itself.
The point that I’m trying to get across here is that what we are developing in machines is actually an anti-subjectivity. Its world is fuzzy and delirious on the outside, and clearly circumscribed on the inside – exactly the reverse of our natural awareness. Machine psychology is a matter of compiling the appropriate reports and submitting them for error correction auditing, while machine perception is a tenuous process of probing and guessing in the dark. Our own inner depths seem to defy all machine expectations, containing neither useful reports on the state of our brain nor unnatural chaos. Our view of the world outside of ourselves is not one which seems to be manufactured on the fly but one which imparts a profound, pervasive sense of orientation and clarity.
Edit: 7/23/16, another example: http://www.fastcodesign.com/3062016/this-neural-network-makes-human-faces-from-scratch-and-theyre-terrifying
Edit 12/19/16, see also https://multisenserealism.com/2016/12/19/fooling-computer-image-recognition-is-easier-than-it-should-be/
Edit: 6/29/17 – https://wordpress.com/post/multisenserealism.com/5161
7/22/17 – https://blog.keras.io/the-limitations-of-deep-learning.html
“One very real risk with contemporary AI is that of misinterpreting what deep learning models do, and overestimating their abilities. A fundamental feature of the human mind is our “theory of mind”, our tendency to project intentions, beliefs and knowledge on the things around us. Drawing a smiley face on a rock suddenly makes it “happy”—in our minds. Applied to deep learning, this means that when we are able to somewhat successfully train a model to generate captions to describe pictures, for instance, we are led to believe that the model “understands” the contents of the pictures, as well as the captions it generates. We then proceed to be very surprised when any slight departure from the sort of images present in the training data causes the model to start generating completely absurd captions.”
1/6/18 – https://gizmodo.com/this-simple-sticker-can-trick-neural-networks-into-thin-1821735479/amp
5/2/2019 – heatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/05/ai-evolved-these-trippy-images-to-please-a-monkeys-neurons/588517
How Does Human Consciousness Work?
How Does Human Consciousness Work? (Quora)
I have given up trying to explain why consciousness is not an emergent property and why emergence is incoherent when applied to consciousness, so this answer is only for readers who already understand that the eliminativist/materialist account of consciousness fails. This means that you understand that awareness cannot be something that physical objects do, or a quality that they have (panpsychism), or even that mind and matter are two parts of the same coin (dual aspect monism), but that all forms and functions, physical or logical, can only exist within a context of what might be called pansensitivity, or sensation-that-makes-sense. This is not to say that human consciousness is the center of the universe and that all phenomena must make sense to us, but that all phenomena must be present in some modality of detection and interaction. This can be understood rationally with no need of any empirical testing. All that is required is for us to play out the null hypothesis: If there is no possibility of any detection or interaction with phenomenon X, then phenomenon X is indiscernible from nothing at all.
The OP then, asking how human consciousness works, should be broken down into two separate parts:
1) How does awareness in general work?
2) How does human consciousness differ from awareness in general?
1) In consideration of the above, the ‘how’ of awareness becomes a metaphysical issue – it could be said even a meta-ontological issue. If awareness-in-general (or use my term pansensitivity) is the most primitive prerequisite for all phenomena in all possible universes, then we must retrain ourselves to stop looking for more primitive phenomena which compose awareness.
I think that we can say awareness is sensory-motive in nature. That is, there is a quality of passive perceiving and active participating which cannot be rationally done without. Even an atom or subatomic particle requires a context where its identity is made coherent in some way, where its presence is detected or can be inferred from some detection of its effects. In the absence of such a detection, again, there is no difference between such a particle and nothing at all. There is no context from which to derive that difference.
That doesn’t mean solipsism – it doesn’t mean that particles don’t exist unless we see them, but it does mean that the concept of ‘existence’ is incompatible with the existence of our own consciousness unless it is identical to detection/participation in some modality or context.
We need not posit a universal mind or God (although there is nothing that I am proposing which rules that out), only that existence itself in the absence of all perception is fantastically implausible given that 100% of what we know of the universe comes to us exclusively through perception. If the universe doesn’t need perception, then there would be no rational explanation for why some parts of the universe could evolve such a redundant and irrational feature to depend upon exclusively.
From this sensory-motive awareness-in-general, we can develop a hypothesis about how it divides and multiplies itself into different perceived forms and participatory functions. This entails performing a kind of Copernican inversion on our early 21st century* worldview, turning the outside (<matter>mass>energy>entropy>space) in, and the inside (pansense>sense<motive>significance>time) out. I don’t expect anyone to really understand that right away…it has taken me several years to put it together in those terms, but hopefully the general idea of the role that symmetry plays comes through. Suffice it to say, I think that how awareness works is that it plays with variations on itself using separation and reconnection on many levels at once. It’s very much like the view that has been a part of Eastern philosophy and Western mysticism for centuries, but with the important difference of plugging directly into modern models of physics and information.
As far as information goes, the sensory-motive primitive can be plugged into the medium-signal relation. Physics gives us a lot of these kinds of conjugates: surface-depth, electro-magnetism, space-time, mass-energy, etc, but when we are working with information and semiotics, we lose the concrete reality of sensation and substitute automatic, ideal abstractions of theoretical mechanics. Computer science and math do not concern themselves with how one number is able to add itself to another, only that there is a reliable result. Physics does focus on how phenomena interact, but not what those interactions actually are or what it is that is actually doing the interacting.
The Medium-Signal Relation
In a simple case of communication, two people might hold a string tight on opposite sides of a room and pull on the string once to indicate ‘yes/true/1’ and twice for ‘no/false/0’. In this case the string pulling, along with the tactile sensitivity of each person to detect the state of the string with their hands would be the medium. We can argue that behind that sensitivity is a lot of other cellular and molecular interaction, but that only pushes the medium down into the microphysical level of description. Even at the bottom, we still need some quantum-atomic sensitivity for any kind of basis of interaction to emerge (or diverge).
The combination of string pulling and any schema which is applied to the interpretation of those pulls would be the signal or sign. Many if not most people confuse ‘signals’ with the physical conditions (string pulling, neurons ‘firing’, semiconductors polarizing, etc), but a better understanding is that the signal is a semiotic interpretation; a conscious consideration of changing conditions within a sensory-motive medium.
Another metaphor that I like is brightness vs contrast. Brightness is the medium – if you have zero brightness there is nothing to see. Light, brightness, and the ability to see are, in the absolute sense, the same thing: a condition of awareness. Contrast stands in here for information or signal, which is a second-order relation of brightness and darkness. If you have no brightness, contrast doesn’t help, but if you do have brightness, then contrast allows many degrees of brightness and frequencies of its absorption to be presented simultaneously.
2) The difference between awareness in general and human consciousness is the incredible degree of elaboration, and the specific experiences which have shaped Homo sapiens. The degree of elaboration I’m referring to would be the number of steps from raw pansensitivity to particular subjective sense vs objectively distanced sense (matter-space), to organic molecules, to cells, to tissues, organs, animals, and vertebrates. The corresponding consciousness of such an elaborate chain of continuous world-crafting seems likely to be be appropriately rich and deep aesthetically. The base level sense and motive is enhanced by orders of magnitude to a heart wrenching, visceral level of participation.
I propose that the specific experiences which have shaped us individually and as a species lend our human consciousness its particular qualities. We share many qualities with other species – perhaps tender emotions with mammals, coarse emotions with reptiles, playful trickery with primates, etc. It’s all sourced in real experience over hundreds of millions of years. It is, in my view, very much like our individual psychology is shaped by our experience, and our families and societies are shaped by their histories. This is what makes human consciousness human, and this is why an AI cannot simulate who we are. A computer may copy the signals from the medium of our communications, or from the medium of neuroscience, but without the medium of the totality of human experience going all the way back to before the first life form, it will only be a kind of doll – an imitation of who we are cobbled together from what our brains are and how they behave.
*really legacy 20th century
Post-particle Light Model
Diagram of conventional photon model vs MSR qualitative model.
In the MSR model, photons are figurative rather than literal. The two atoms are presented not as literal particles in space but as vectors of sharable experience.
The mode of signaling is not a literal waving of particles (as depicted in the gif) but a state of empathic/emotive stimulation.
The intent here is not to provide a finished model of electrodynamics. The idea is to give more of a general direction of how hypotheses might be developed using particle-free, aesthetic-empathic signaling.
The signal, or text is a shared quality of interiority which is generated by a masking and unmasking of context, which is the cosmological constant – an aesthetic-participatory ground symbolized here by the rainbow stripes. The black ovals symbolize a masking of the ground awareness which is localized. That masking should be understood to be a temporal, temporary localization…of locality. Spacetime is emergent from masking of the aesthetic ground. The masking can be understood to be entropy or insensitivity, the counter-aesthetic which makes it possible to confine and elaborate experience.
Multisense Realism 
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