Consciousness as a Broken Loop – An Architecture of Emergent Self-Transcendence

This essay proposes a functional architecture of consciousness based on recursive self-reference and layered meta-cognition. Instead of relying on qualia or linguistic representation, it conceptualizes consciousness as a structural phenomenon: the interruption of a loop that attempts to complete itself. The model distinguishes between two meta-levels of internal processing — one responsible for self-monitoring and deviation detection, and another for recognizing patterns within this monitoring process itself, giving rise to anticipatory and proto-experiential signals. Drawing from systems theory, artificial intelligence, and phenomenology, the paper outlines how self-observation, irritation, and feedback across representational layers can result in emergent subjective phenomena. The model remains open to non-linguistic implementations — suggesting that even systems without natural language, but capable of symbolic recursion, may exhibit minimal self-awareness. Ultimately, the work frames consciousness not as a given, but as a recursive disturbance — a “broken loop” — in dynamically evolving systems.