The Starting Point of the Consciousness Problem
The difficulty of consciousness first appears in a familiar question: why does brain activity produce not only information processing and behavior, but also feeling? Why is pain felt? Why do colors appear in particular ways? Why do the body and the world become someone's experience? Even with knowledge of many relevant mechanisms, these questions still call for explanation.
Sustenesis Theory holds that a common way of framing the problem makes this difficulty deeper. It begins by treating the subject as an already established center of experience, places experience inside that center, and puts matter, the body, and observable processes on the other side. The question then becomes how external physical processes enter the subject and produce a subjective existence of a different nature. If subject and experience are assigned to an independent domain at the outset, the explanation must subsequently cross a separation created by that starting point.
Reframing the question does not deny the distinctive character of experience. Feeling pain does differ from a description of pain. What needs reconsideration is whether this difference requires two domains of existence to be separated in advance, and whether the subject must be taken as an unexplained starting point.
Sustenesis Theory begins elsewhere. Existence is the sustaining of structure: differentiated elements form relations under Constraint, enabling a structure to continue existing through change. Sustaining includes formation, adjustment, and revision. Continuity does not require a structure's materials, contents, or states to remain unchanged. It requires enough Sustained Coherence through change for those changes to belong to one continuing process. Coherence does not mean that differences and conflicts have disappeared. Sustenesis Theory
The body, perception, memory, and experience should all be examined within this account of existence. They may have different conditions of realization and levels of organization, without therefore belonging to ontological domains isolated from one another. What is distinctive about consciousness needs to be explained through its relations of sustenesis.
How Reflexivity Enters the Definition of Consciousness
This paper retains the short definition of consciousness:
Consciousness is a sustenetic structure's reflexive integration of itself and its relations with the environment.
This formulation needs to be developed. General structural reflexivity in Sustenesis Theory refers to relations produced within a process of formation re-entering that same process as conditions constraining subsequent formation. The point is not simply that a result is retained or that states are causally related. It is that previously formed relations actually change how later formation can occur. This belongs to the dynamic structure of continuing sustenesis and does not in itself entail consciousness. The account of consciousness concerns a particular level of organization that requires a further explanation. The paper on structural reflexivity and Sustained Coherence
In the context of consciousness, reflexivity has a more specific content. A structure undergoing continuing sustenesis forms perceptions of its own states and its relations with the environment. These perceptions re-enter its process of sustenesis, helping form subsequent states, directions of action, and conditions of continuing existence. “Re-entry” here describes a constitutive relation. Perception changes how the system subsequently organizes itself, engages with its environment, and forms actions; it does more than become a record about the system.
When a person feels hungry, bodily needs, available food, past experience, the present situation, and possible actions enter a shared relation. Hunger can reorganize attention, make certain environmental differences salient, and change the direction of subsequent action. Feeling participates here in how the person continues to sustain and form themselves.
This does not require a person to think explicitly about themselves at every moment. Seeing a road, hearing a sound, or feeling pain need not be accompanied by the judgment “I am perceiving.” Reflexivity at the level of consciousness first concerns how experience enters the integration of self–environment relations. Explicitly taking oneself as an object of thought is a further form of organization built upon that basis.
Accordingly, this paper proposes an expanded definition:
Consciousness is the process by which a structure undergoing continuing sustenesis forms perceptions of itself and its relations with the environment, and these perceptions re-enter its process of sustenesis as part of its subsequent states, directions of action, and continuing existence. First-person experience is the structurally intrinsic form of this reflexive sustenesis; feeling belongs to and constitutes the subject's present state of existence.
This definition sets out a direction for structurally explaining consciousness. It cannot be treated as an already completed sufficient criterion. Feedback devices also allow their outputs to change subsequent operation, and many unconscious bodily regulations participate in continued maintenance. Recurrent relations, even together with self-models and whole-system regulation, therefore do not directly establish the presence of experience.
“Perception” also needs a stable meaning here. As a term describing mechanisms, it can refer to a system's uptake and differentiation of differences, without presupposing consciousness. As a term describing experience, it refers to differences entering the subject's state in a felt way. An argument must not silently move from the former meaning to the latter. Sustenesis Theory proposes that both should be understood within the same process of sustenesis, but still needs to explain what organization turns the uptake of states into integration that has an experiential character.
How Self-Feeling Constitutes the “I”
The existing consciousness paper explains first-person experience as the way a living system sustains reflexive integration from within. This direction can be made more specific through the structural belonging of feeling: an occurrence of feeling already belongs to and constitutes the present state of this structure undergoing continuing sustenesis. The existing core consciousness paper, Version 0.7
The central proposition of this revision is:
Self-feeling is a constituent of the existence of the “I.”
“Self-feeling” emphasizes the relation in which feeling is present for the subject itself. It includes pain, hunger, tranquility, and fear, as well as experiences directed toward the external world, such as seeing colors and hearing sounds. These feelings do not require the subject first to reflect upon itself as an object. A feeling may be directed toward the body or the world while constituting the subject's present state of existence.
“From within” does not mean that another observer resides inside the subject. If feeling must be seen by an inner subject before it becomes experience, we still have not explained how that observer feels. We have merely moved the same problem further inward. Sustenesis Theory does not require this additional subject.
When a person is in pain, that pain already constitutes part of their present state of existence. It can further participate in the integration of bodily states, attention, memory, and possibilities for action, affecting how the person subsequently sustains and forms themselves. Pain does not first appear as independent information and then get received by a fully established “I.” “I feel pain” expresses the subject's existence in this state at this moment.
This relation goes further than “I possess pain.” Pain may reorganize how I feel my body, how I engage with the environment, and what actions become possible for me. Self-feeling therefore participates in who I am now and may also, through attention, memory, and action, enter my subsequent formation. The relation between subject and feeling needs to be understood within this continuing process.
Any particular feeling is only part of the subject's existence, not the whole of it. After a feeling subsides, the body, memory, and other relations sustaining the person may continue. The claim concerns feeling's constitutive status; it does not equate the subject with the contents of feeling at a particular moment.
“Belonging to me” is also more than an added label of ownership. Pain can have a first-person character even when I do not explicitly think “This is my pain.” Its relation to me is already established in the concrete process of experience and does not await confirmation in language.
An external observer can observe relevant physiological processes, listen to my description, understand how pain occurs, and form imagination or empathy within their own structure. These relations can be profound. Nevertheless, the observer's understanding, imagination, and empathy belong to the observer's own process of sustenesis. Having information about an experience and undergoing that experience are different relations.
Another person therefore cannot have the very same occurrence of feeling simply by understanding or simulating it. We need to distinguish the same type of feeling from the same occurrence of experience. Two people may undergo very similar pain, but similarity does not turn two particular events into one. If the corresponding feeling occurs in another sustenetic structure, it already constitutes a state of that structure.
This non-substitutability requires neither a closed mental space nor the claim that third-person research can never understand experience. It means that a descriptive relation to experience cannot automatically become the subject's relation of undergoing that experience. First-person and third-person relations concern the same process, without thereby occupying interchangeable positions.
The explanatory scope of structural belonging should remain clear. It explains why a feeling that has occurred belongs to this subject, and why another structure's representation of it cannot replace it. It does not, on its own, establish that any state participating in a system's sustenesis becomes a feeling. A theory of consciousness still needs to explain what forms of reflexive integration can give rise to experience and how they differ from unconscious integration.
The Mechanisms of Feeling and Phantom Limb Pain
How the particular contents of feeling arise and how feeling becomes part of the subject's own state are closely related questions, but neither can replace the other.
Light, sound, temperature, and bodily changes do not carry a complete experiential content independently of the concrete system in which they occur. Bodily states, memory, attention, existing concepts, and environmental relations jointly constrain how a person feels. Similar stimuli can enter different experiential states, and the same person's feelings can change with their situation. The Sustenesis paper on feeling has discussed multiple frameworks and dynamic stability in this direction. “How Is Feeling Possible?”
Predictive processing, emotional appraisal, memory research, global workspace accounts, and embodied cognition offer explanations of mechanisms at different levels. They can explain how information is selected, integrated, and used, and how the body and environment participate in forming feelings. Integration among mechanisms alone does not establish that first-person experience has been fully explained. A structural account needs to explain how these processes jointly become a subject's state of existence. Equally, invoking a “whole” or “belonging” cannot justify omitting mechanisms of realization or criteria for experience.
Pain makes these distinctions especially clear. Pain and nociception are different, and activity in sensory neurons alone does not allow us to infer whether a person is in pain. Bodily injury, related signal processing, and the experience of pain therefore cannot be directly equated. Pain can also impair bodily functioning and psychological well-being. Its being part of a subject's experience does not guarantee that it always benefits the system's maintenance. IASP terminology on pain
Being conscious does not mean that a system always maintains itself effectively. An explanation of consciousness needs to account for how feeling enters the subject's sustenesis, without conflating the existence of feeling with whether it serves an adaptive function.
Phantom limb pain makes the issue more concrete. After an amputation, a person may still feel pain in a hand that no longer exists. The missing limb does not continue to exist in its former location, yet the pain experience is real. “Phantom” should not be taken to mean that the pain is fictitious. MedlinePlus on phantom limb pain
At least three questions need to be distinguished here: where the pain is felt, the physiological processes realizing it, and the subject to which it belongs. A feeling's being directed toward the missing hand does not mean that the pain exists in that hand, or that it is detached from the body. After amputation, the continuing body and nervous system remain involved in forming the feeling.
The particular mechanisms cannot be replaced by one uniform story. A small longitudinal study published in 2025 found that cortical representations of the hand could remain stable before and after amputation. This cautions against explaining all phantom limb phenomena through neighboring cortical regions taking over the area of the missing limb. The study also did not offer a complete account of the causes of phantom limb pain. Schone et al., 2025
Sustenesis Theory interprets this case as follows: the pain belongs to the subject whose sustenesis continues. The body part toward which it is directed differs from the subject to which it belongs. This pain already constitutes the person's present state of existence and can further influence their integration of the body, the situation, and possible actions. Another person can understand these processes without thereby becoming the person undergoing this occurrence of pain.
Phantom limb pain supports distinguishing experiential content, mechanisms of realization, and belonging to a subject. It does not by itself prove that any particular neural state must be conscious. Medical research establishes the relevant phenomena and physiological relations; interpreting feeling as a constituent of the subject's state of sustenesis is the philosophical account proposed here.
The same distinctions should be retained for color experience. An account of light and visual processing, and an account of how red appears in a subject's experience, concern related but different explanatory levels. Recognition, comparison, memory, and action can participate in organizing color experience without being sufficient proof of experience. The task of a theory of consciousness is to clarify these relations, rather than add an unanalyzable subjective entity outside signal processing.
The Conditions of Life and Artificial Consciousness
Human consciousness is realized through a concrete living body. Bodily needs, vulnerability, emotion, memory, and actual action bring environmental changes into an ongoing process of living existence. These conditions have a substantive role in explaining consciousness.
It does not follow, without further argument, that biological life is logically necessary for every possible form of consciousness. A general theory needs to distinguish the realizations we currently know from the relations of sustenesis that could, in principle, form consciousness. Restricting the definition to biological life in advance would exclude nonbiological systems before they undergo structural analysis.
This does not mean that beyond a biological body, consciousness would amount only to abstract computation. If an artificial system could become conscious, it would still require concrete conditions of existence. We would need to examine what sustains its boundaries, how it forms a continuous relation to itself, how environmental consequences affect its states, and how its uptake of these relations re-enters its sustenesis. Judgments about artificial consciousness cannot remain at the level of output alone.
A system's being able to say “I am in pain,” retain interaction records, possess a self-model, or inspect its own output is meaningful in each case. None of these facts alone establishes that it is experiencing pain. Continuous operation also does not directly amount to continuity of a subject, and executing an externally set goal does not by itself establish an endogenous value direction.
The existing AI paper uses “quasi-conscious structures” to describe certain structural similarities in language, reasoning, and interaction. This distinction between levels can be retained, but “quasi-consciousness” itself cannot serve as evidence that first-person experience has emerged. The Sustenesis paper on AI consciousness
An endogenous value direction here means that the system's directions form actual structural relations with its own maintenance, revision, and development. This does not require prior moral judgment or mean that a direction must be free of external sources. External conditions also participate in the formation of human values. What needs explaining is how these directions become established within a concrete system and constrain its subsequent sustenesis.
The analysis of artificial systems therefore needs to be concrete. Memory, action, self-monitoring, and environmental embeddedness can provide lines of inquiry, but listing these capabilities cannot replace an argument about how they jointly form a subject's relation to itself. If an artificial system develops more complete self-maintaining boundaries and relations of reflexive sustenesis, the consciousness question should be reconsidered on that basis. Before sufficient explanation and evidence are available, functional similarity cannot be directly taken as the establishment of first-person experience.
Biological life currently provides the clearest example of how consciousness is realized. The possibility of nonbiological consciousness requires open structural analysis. It cannot be decided in advance by the category of material involved, or affirmed directly from linguistic performance.
The Formation of the Subject through Time
Explaining consciousness through sustenesis also changes the position of the subject. The subject's existence needs to be accounted for through its boundaries, relations to itself, and continuing organization. It cannot simply be assumed in order to supply an owner for experience.
Within an already formed process of life, bodily states, feelings, memories, and actions continually participate in sustaining the subject. Experience belongs to the subject, but this does not mean that the subject exists fully formed independently of these processes. These relations continually form the subject while providing conditions for new experiences.
This relation does not require each feeling to create the entire subject anew. A particular conscious state needs to be distinguished from the structure of a subject continuing across time. A person's sensations, attention, and interpretations of themselves change continually while the body and organizational relations sustaining that person may continue. Continuity of the subject cannot simply be equated with explicit self-consciousness at every moment, or with a narrative remaining unchanged.
Conflicting feelings also need not cause the subject to fall apart immediately. A person can want to rest and to finish their work, or feel both anticipation and concern about a decision. The subject can organize these tensions as their own situation and continue acting before achieving complete agreement. Sustenesis requires enough Sustained Coherence for continuing formation, not the disappearance of internal differences.
Consciousness, subject, knowledge, and understanding therefore need to be distinguished within the same framework. Knowledge concerns structures that can be retained, used, tested, and revised. Understanding concerns how these relations hold within broader relations of meaning. Consciousness concerns reflexive integration of self–environment relations and its experiential form, while the subject concerns how these relations form a continuing position of selfhood through time. The functioning of knowledge does not thereby establish consciousness; the occurrence of a feeling also does not require the subject to explain its own structure in full.
Repositioning the Hard Problem
Sustenesis Theory's main contribution to the hard problem is to remove an unexplained premise: that physical processes and experience must first be placed in two separate domains, then await a special force to connect them.
Existence and experience can be understood within the same framework of sustenesis. Perception is a structural process, and feeling actually participates in forming the subject's state. First-person character expresses the relation in which this state is present for the structure itself. A third-person description brings the process into the observer's structure of understanding. Both concern the same process, without becoming interchangeable relations.
This offers a structural account of why a feeling is mine. It belongs to me because it participates in and constitutes this continuing subject. An understanding of it can form in another subject without thereby replacing the original experiential event.
What still needs explaining is what forms of structural integration can have an experiential character. Recognizing that feeling belongs to a subject cannot automatically turn all internal states into feelings. Recognizing that recurrence participates in ongoing formation cannot automatically make every reflexive structure conscious. If these distinctions cannot be developed further, Sustenesis Theory will have changed the mode of description without sufficiently advancing the explanation of consciousness.
Further research should center on these distinctions: which relations of integration differ between conscious and unconscious states; how feeling changes subsequent sustenesis; which conditions sustain or disrupt continuity of experience; and how first-person reports, behavior, and physiological processes jointly constrain a structural explanation. Artificial systems require the same analysis, rather than judgments based only on similar behavior.
Sustenesis Theory therefore does not claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness. It proposes a more explicit ontological starting point and direction of explanation: self-feeling is a constituent of the existence of the “I”; the subject forms continuously through relations that include these feelings; and reflexivity allows perceptions of itself and its relations with the environment to participate in subsequent sustenesis. The sufficient conditions for consciousness remain to be established. First-person character can nevertheless already be analyzed within a concrete process of existence, without placing it in a mysterious interior separated from the world.