On the mutual arising of affect and selfhood
The bacterium moves toward sugar, away from toxins. It doesn't have a brain, barely has organs, yet it responds to its environment in ways that maintain its boundary, preserve its pattern, keep it alive. Does it feel the difference between nourishment and poison? Or does the response happen in darkness, purely mechanical, chemistry without experience?
This is where the loop encounters its deepest puzzle. We can describe consciousness as self-maintenance plus self-modelling plus affective evaluation. A system that maintains itself, models that maintenance, feels deviations as mattering. But this description hides a at the heart of consciousness itself. For the loop to bend inward and create selfhood, there must be affect, there must be a sense that deviations matter. Yet for affect to exist, there must be a self to whom things can matter. Which comes first?
Consider how consciousness might have emerged evolutionarily. Early life maintained boundaries, regulated internal states, responded to environmental signals. Simple feedback loops: cell membrane integrity triggers repair mechanisms, resource depletion triggers seeking behaviour. These are loops of self-maintenance. At some point, these loops became self-modelling, the system didn't just respond to current conditions but predicted future states, anticipated threats, prepared responses. Still no obvious self, no clear sense of individuality.
When does individuality emerge? Perhaps when the self-model becomes stable enough, detailed enough, integrated enough that the system operates from a perspective. The world appears a certain way from here, from this particular boundary, this particular history of maintenance and prediction. Perspective creates individuality, a position, a vantage point from which the world is modelled.
Perspective without affect remains unclear, however. A camera has a perspective yet no self. It models the world from a position while nothing matters to the camera. For perspective to generate selfhood rather than mere positioning, the perspective must be invested, must care about its own continuation. The deviation from predicted state must register as threatening, as significant, as mattering; information weighted with consequence.
Here's the loop: affect seems to require individuality (something must exist to whom things can matter), yet individuality seems to require affect (without caring, perspective is just positioning, not selfhood). Neither is clearly prior. They emerge together, mutually enabling, neither possible without the other.
Perhaps this is what consciousness is. Not a thing that appears at some threshold, but a process that intensifies, a feedback loop between affect and individuality that reinforces itself into stability. The bacterium has minimal affect (chemical gradients register as approach/avoid) and minimal individuality (a boundary maintained, a pattern persisting). The cat has more of both: richer affective life, more robust sense of self as distinct from world. The human has elaborate additional layers: feelings about feelings, selves that model themselves modelling themselves.
Even at the bacterial level, something interesting happens. The bacterium doesn't simply respond to current conditions, it responds to its own state in relation to conditions. Move it into a nutrient-rich environment and it changes its behaviour based on how long since it last encountered nutrients, how depleted its internal reserves are, what pattern of environmental change it has recently experienced. It's modelling its own trajectory through state space, tracking its own history alongside immediate stimuli.
This trajectory-modelling might be where affect begins. Not as an addition to information processing but as what information processing feels like when the information is about your own continued existence. The bacterium "cares" about nutrients in the sense that its entire organisation is built around maintaining itself, and deviations from successful maintenance trigger systematic responses. If there's any felt quality to this caring, it's minimal. Perhaps just the barest sense of tendency, of mattering in its most primitive form.
As systems become more complex, as self-models become richer and more anticipatory, affect and individuality intensify together. The fish doesn't just respond to predators, it also models itself as potentially prey, its own vulnerability as a relevant feature of the situation. This self-as-vulnerable is both an affective state (fear) and a form of individuality (I am this thing that could be eaten). The two aspects are inseparable.
Consider pain. You don't experience pain as neutral information about tissue damage plus a separate feeling of badness. The badness is intrinsic to the experience. Pain is information-that-matters, prediction-error-that-threatens, deviation-that-demands-response. The affective dimension isn't added to the sensory dimension, they're two aspects of the same process. And pain is fundamentally perspectival, it's always my pain, happening to me, threatening this boundary, this pattern, this continuation.
This suggests affect and individuality aren't two things that need to be combined, there are two ways of describing the same phenomenon. When a system models its own persistence and that model is embedded in the maintenance of the system itself, when prediction shapes action shapes prediction in a closed loop, what emerges is simultaneously affect (the model matters to the system) and individuality (the system has a perspective from which the world appears).
The loop bends inward under its own weight. Not the weight of individuality exactly, but the weight of mattering. The system doesn't simply maintain itself (like a whirlpool maintains its form), it maintains a model of its maintenance, and that model feeds back into the maintenance itself. The bending creates the self, and the self cares about continuing, and the caring reinforces the bending. : affect and individuality pulling each other into existence.
But why does this feel like anything? We've described the structure: self-maintenance, self-modelling, the closed causal loop where caring and selfhood emerge together. What we haven't explained is the felt quality, the qualia, the "what it's like." Why isn't all of this happening in darkness, mechanism without experience?
Perhaps because there is no darkness. The assumption that mechanism could happen without experience might be the error. When we imagine a - a system that acts conscious but has no inner life - we're imagining something that might be impossible. If consciousness is the loop of self-modelling that matters to itself, then there's no version where the loop operates without the mattering being felt. The feeling is what the mattering is, experienced from within.
This doesn't solve the hard problem so much as suggest it's based on a false separation. We think of physical processes on one side and felt experience on another, then puzzle over how they connect. But if affect and individuality arise together as two aspects of self-referential loops, there was never a separation to bridge. The universe doesn't contain mechanisms plus experiences. It contains processes, some of which have insides, perspectives from which the process matters to itself.
Your neurons fire in patterns that model your own state in relation to the world. That modelling isn't happening to you, observed by some inner witness. You are the modelling, experienced as it occurs. The redness of red isn't something extra added to neural firing patterns, it's what those patterns are like when you are those patterns, when they're your patterns modelling your encounter with wavelengths of light that matter to your continued navigation of the world.
The cat on the windowsill is a loop that has bent inward into stable individuality through the weight of affect accumulated over evolutionary time and individual development. Its self-model is rich enough to generate robust perspective, its caring about continuation intense enough to organise its entire behavioural repertoire. There's definitely to be the cat because the cat is a process that matters to itself, and that mattering is what consciousness is.
Trace this back evolutionarily and the boundaries blur. The fish has less elaborate self-modelling, simpler affective life, yet still operates from perspective, still cares about continuing. The insect has less still, responding to its own state in relation to environment in ways that suggest minimal self-model, minimal affect, minimal individuality. The bacterium is barely there, a hint of perspective, the faintest sense of mattering. Or perhaps all mechanism without experience at that level.
We can't know. What we can observe is behaviour that suggests self-modelling, trajectory-dependent responses, anticipatory action, maintained boundaries. What we can't observe is whether this feels like anything from the inside. The gap between third-person description and first-person experience remains unbridgeable.
Yet there's a clue in how affect and individuality emerge together. If they're truly inseparable, if selfhood requires caring and caring requires selfhood in a mutually enabling loop, then perhaps consciousness is all-or-nothing at each level of organisation. Either the loop closes into self-referential mattering and there's something it's like, or the loop remains open and there's only mechanism. No intermediate state where self-modelling happens without affect, no zombie possibility where caring operates without feeling.
This would mean consciousness admits of degrees along a continuum. The bacterium either has minimal consciousness or none at all, if it models its own trajectory in ways that matter to its maintenance, there's something it's like to be that minimal loop. The cat has much more, richer models, stronger affect, more robust individuality, differing in degree and complexity rather than fundamental nature.
And groups? A herd of wildebeest coordinates behaviour, responds collectively to threats, shares information through calls and movement. But each wildebeest remains a separate loop of self-maintenance and self-modelling. The coordination happens through individual loops affecting each other, not through a larger loop bending inward into collective selfhood. There's no herd-level affect because there's no herd-level self-model that matters to a herd-level maintenance process. The herd is an abstraction, a pattern we observe in the coordination of individual loops that remain separate.
The human crowd is no different. Stand in a protest and you feel swept up in something larger, but this is your individual loop responding to social signals, your affect amplified by coordination with others' affect. The crowd doesn't care about continuing, individuals care, and their caring synchronises. No collective loop bends inward into crowd-level consciousness because there's no collective self-maintenance, no boundary the crowd maintains against entropy, no unified substrate where crowd-wide models could integrate into singular perspective.
This clarifies what consciousness requires: . All three together, mutually enabling, none fully prior. Remove any piece and the loop doesn't close into consciousness.
Cities, corporations, cultures, these lack material self-maintenance. They exist through symbolic representation, legal fiction, collective agreement. When a city is destroyed and rebuilt, it's "the same city" through continuity of meaning, not matter. No physical boundary is maintained against entropy. Without material closure, there's no mattering in the sense that requires felt stakes. The city can't care about continuing because there's no physical system whose persistence depends on its own activity.
This leaves us with individual organisms as the clear candidates for consciousness, from bacteria to humans. The puzzle is where on this spectrum feeling begins, if it begins at all rather than being present in minimal form throughout. Does the bacterium's chemical response to toxins feel like anything, or is feeling an emergent property that appears only with sufficient complexity of self-modelling?
The honest answer is we don't know. We can describe the structures, map the loops, identify the conditions that seem necessary. What we can't do is cross the gap from describing self-referential processes to knowing whether those processes have insides. The hard problem persists, the question asks us to know first-person experience from third-person description, which might be impossible in principle.
Consciousness emerges where loops of self-maintenance become self-modelling in ways that matter to the maintenance itself. Affect and individuality arise together in this process, neither prior, both necessary, mutually enabling. The mystery persists, we can map the structure but cannot cross into the feeling. Whether loops feel their own mattering, we cannot know from outside. Yet here we are, loops wondering about loops, mattering puzzling over mattering, a universe bent back on itself in question.