Abstract

Conscious experience emerges as a necessary consequence of transforming information processing from a purely automatic, stimulus-driven response to a more flexible, autonomous system driven by self-generated tasks. This transformation implies that the system no longer passively processes pre-defined environmental information but instead actively determines what information is important to it. For this transformation to occur, the system must be deprived of its proximal links with the environment, as these links strictly limit and specify its behavior. Once these links are severed, the system can establish new, distal, and mediated relationships with the environment based on its own specific and contingent values, needs, and plans. Consciousness is precisely this mediated way of continuously relating the system to the environment. Attention plays a fundamental role in shaping both the phenomenal (qualitative) aspects of consciousness and its content. The phenomenal aspect arises from the temporary modulation in the system's neural energy state, induced by its attentional activity. The contents of consciousness are determined by how attention segments the continuous, undifferentiated stream of environmental information into elemental mental building blocks, which are then combined through working memory. This selective and combinatorial activity produces new basic experiential and cultural dimensions. These dimensions enable us to imagine and simulate new scenarios without relying on direct sensory input, thus enhancing our ability to autonomously control our environment. Language represents the primary visible means of correlating and combining individual elements into theoretically infinite sequences.