Consciousness as a Compressed Recursive Self-Model: A Synthesis of Empirical Evidence

We propose that consciousness arises from the brain’s recursive self-modeling and compression of its own complex activity, yielding a unified and coherent subjective experience (Baars, 1988; Dennett, 1991; Tononi, 2004). On this view, the brain constructs a high-level, low-dimensional summary of its own operations that preserves behaviorally and introspectively relevant structure while discarding fine-grained neural detail. This theory is supported by convergent evidence from neurology, psychiatry, pharmacology, developmental psychology, and comparative cognition. Disruptions to recursive self-modeling or integrative compression reliably impair or fragment consciousness, while their integrity correlates with the richness and unity of subjective experience (Gazzaniga, 2000; Alkire et al., 2008; Lyssenko et al., 2018; Bertenthal & Fischer, 1978; Beran, 2019). This synthesis provides a parsimonious and empirically grounded account of consciousness, reframing the so-called “hard problem” (Chalmers, 1995) and the mystery of qualia (Nagel, 1974) as cognitive illusions arising from the structural and introspective limitations of the self-model itself (Dennett, 1991; Frankish, 2016).