The Moderate Problem of Consciousness: Self-Modeling and the Unfolding of Phenomenal Depth over Time

This article proposes a functional explanation of phenomenal depth through the dynamics of self-modeling. A system discriminates its own state with sufficient confidence and uses it for planning, yet does not complete its reconstruction: each answer changes the conditions of the next examination. Limited attention and diverse contexts sustain a shifting unfinishedness that becomes accessible to the system itself. The article considers how this is generalized into a conception of the qualities of experience, and how present depth is retrospectively attributed to the original perception. The explanation develops from the story of a red flower into a minimal formal framework. Three types of tasks are distinguished, and philosophical implications and relationships with existing approaches are discussed. An examination of the hypothesis’s foundations is separated from the account of the mechanism and precedes the experimental program. The article presents a theoretical hypothesis; it reports no original empirical results.