The Nature of Consciousness and Self Consciousness as Narrative Cosmology

Across the living world, numerous organisms exhibit signs of environmental responsiveness that suggest a form of consciousness. Yet, when we speak of self-consciousness — awareness not only of stimuli but of one’s own identity within a temporal and causal frame — the list of qualifying organisms narrows dramatically. In this article, we examine how consciousness has been understood in biological and philosophical terms before arriving at a more precise and uniquely human phenomenon: narrative cosmology. This concept posits that human beings do not merely possess self-consciousness in the abstract, but construct their entire experience of reality through temporally unfolding, causally coherent narratives — which, in the context of Axiomatology, also essentially equate to values. These narratives are not passive reflections of the world, but the very structure through which action, meaning, and identity become possible.

From Pantheism to Integrated Information Theory (IIT)

One of the most profound shifts in the conceptualization of consciousness concerns the divide between two metaphysical orientations: first, that everything—including so-called “inanimate” nature—is conscious or at least proto-conscious (as in pantheism); and second, that consciousness is exclusive to humans (or, more broadly, higher organisms), and the rest of the universe is devoid of any sentient property. Axiomatology navigates this divide by partially aligning with the Integrated Information Theory (IIT). In the following sections, we will explore how the ontological framework of Axiomatology overlaps with, but ultimately diverges to a degree from, both pantheistic metaphysics and contemporary scientific theories such as IIT.

Pantheism: From Plato’s Light to Schopenhauer’s Darkness

Pantheism is the doctrine that God and the universe are identical — Deus sive Natura, as Spinoza famously wrote. In this worldview, divinity is not separate from the cosmos but is the cosmos. All that exists is sacred because it is a direct manifestation of the divine. There is no personal or transcendent Creator standing apart from the world; rather, the universe itself is the only divine reality. Consequently, nature and the physical laws governing it are not mere mechanical processes—they are sacred in and of themselves.

Spinoza’s pantheism was a radical departure from Cartesian dualism. While Descartes posited three fundamental substances (res cogitans, res extensa, and God), Spinoza collapsed all into a single substantia infinita. In his system, mind and matter are merely attributes of the same underlying divine substance. Every entity, from rocks to thoughts, becomes a modus — a finite expression of the infinite.

This metaphysical move — flattening all dualism into a monist divine substance — sets the stage for an important historical evolution. Later thinkers, such as Schopenhauer, would invert this sacred metaphysics into something darker. Drawing on Eastern traditions like Vedanta and Buddhism, Schopenhauer reinterpreted the hidden layer of reality as not rational and luminous (as in Plato), but irrational and insatiable — a blind Will pulsing beneath all phenomena. In his words: “All willing springs from lack, from deficiency, and thus from suffering.” The world, for Schopenhauer, is not guided by Logos, but driven by a restless and tragic Wille zum Leben — a force not entirely unlike Spinoza’s nature, yet stripped of all divinity.

Schopenhauer’s metaphysics mirrors Plato’s “two-worlds” ontology — one of appearance, and one of true reality — but flips the polarity. Where Plato offered the Form of the Good as the ultimate attractor, Schopenhauer gives us perpetual striving and existential sorrow. Yet both systems agree: the phenomenal world is not the final truth. The noumenal — the Real beneath appearances — is the key.

Panentheism: Kant’s Proto-Panentheism and the German Romantic Inheritance

Panentheism asserts that God is both immanent in the world and transcendent beyond it. Unlike pantheism — which identifies God with the totality of the cosmos — panentheism holds that the universe exists within God, yet God’s being is not exhausted by the universe. This theological-metaphysical view safeguards both divine transcendence and the sanctity and meaningful structure of creation. It has been adopted in various forms across mystical traditions, Christian metaphysics (notably Eastern Orthodoxy and Process Theology), and German Idealism.

A precursor to panentheistic reasoning is Immanuel Kant. While Kant is not a panentheist in any formal sense, his mature philosophy—especially in the Critique of Judgment—reveals significant structural affinities with panentheistic metaphysics.

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously denies theoretical access to God, freedom, and immortality. These “Ideas of Reason” are regulative, not constitutive — they orient reason morally and teleologically but do not yield objective knowledge. However, in the Critique of Judgment, Kant reintroduces purposiveness into the system through a teleological interpretation of nature. He explores how living organisms appear as natural ends—entities whose parts exist for and through the whole — without collapsing into mechanistic causality. While he insists that this teleology arises from human cognitive structure (the reflective judgment), he also suggests that this regulative use of reason intimates a supersensible substrate — a deeper, morally ordered unity between nature and freedom.

In this context, God is not posited as an empirical cause, but as the intelligible ground of both nature's purposiveness and moral law. This dual orientation—God as the transcendental ground of freedom and as the regulative ideal of nature’s purposive unfolding — resembles the panentheistic structure: God is beyond the world and yet implicated in its moral and teleological intelligibility.

This vision is further developed by German Idealists, especially Schelling. In his early work (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800), Schelling treats nature as a visible form of spirit and sees the Absolute unfolding dialectically through subjective and objective expressions. But in his later works—particularly the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom—Schelling introduces the concept of the Ungrund (the irrational ground) and proposes a God who contains within Himself both the unconscious basis of nature and the free, self-revealing Spirit. This duality—darkness and light, nature and freedom—is not static, but dynamic: God undergoes self-becoming through creation, yet always exceeds it. This marks a decisive step away from Spinozistic pantheism and toward a panentheistic metaphysics of divine becoming.

Alfred North Whitehead, in the 20th century, codifies panentheism in systematic philosophical terms. In Process and Reality (1929), Whitehead constructs a metaphysics of “actual occasions” (similar to Axiomatology’s Self Fusion) — events of experience that constitute reality. God is the primordial actual occasion who prehends all others and lures them toward greater intensity of value. Whitehead’s God has two natures: the primordial nature, which houses eternal objects (pure potentials), and the consequent nature, which feels and integrates the world’s becoming. The world unfolds within God’s experience, and God grows in response to the world. This dipolar conception maintains transcendence (God as the source of order and possibility) and immanence (God as the responsive participant in every moment of becoming). Panentheism here becomes a logical conclusion of processual ontology.

Thus, Kant provides a proto-panentheistic scaffolding by distinguishing between nature’s intelligibility and its moral telos, while Schelling and Whitehead offer fully articulated systems in which God’s being simultaneously includes, exceeds, and evolves through the cosmos.

Whitehead’s God

Whitehead’s God is not a distant omnipotent ruler but a dynamic, bi-polar entity that participates in the process of becoming. His metaphysical function is divided into two distinct poles: the eternal and the temporal. These correspond, respectively, to pure potentiality and active relationality, echoing foundational ideas in Plato and Kant while transcending both in a dynamic ontology of process.

The Eternal Pole — Pure Potential Structured for Becoming

The eternal pole of God functions as the infinite reservoir of eternal objects — pure, abstract potentialities that are neither spatial nor temporal. These objects are akin to Plato’s Forms (e.g., Justice, Redness, Circularity), but unlike Plato’s static realm of ideal being, Whitehead’s eternal objects do not exist apart from the world — they are not actual until selected by an actual occasion in the creative process. Their meaning is relational, not intrinsic.

Whitehead’s conception also resonates with Kant’s a priori categories — the cognitive preconditions for all empirical experience — and even with Jung’s archetypes (although those contain more in the narrative sense than eternal objects, they can be seen as the “dream patterns” of eternal objectes). Just as Kant posits that phenomena are shaped through the a prioristructures of space, time, and causality, Whitehead’s eternal objects form a metaphysical grammar through which any becoming is possible. They are the structural preconditions of novelty, not imposed from above, but offered as open-ended potential for value realization.

In Axiomatological terms, the eternal pole is the cosmic archive of unrealized moral geometries — the domain from which any new node in the Self Fusion process might draw to instantiate previously unrealized value constellations. Axiomatology posits the existence of such cosmological narratives. Whitehead said that “Eternal objects are the pure potentials of the universe, seeking entry into actuality. But they require the agency of actual occasions to gain realization. Alone, they are mere possibilities; together with the temporal world, they become forms of experience.” That is very telling — and similar to how Axiomatology sees cosmic patterns.

The Temporal Pole — The Initial Aim as Divine Lure

The temporal pole of God, by contrast, is God-in-process: God as the ultimate subject who prehends the entire universe of becoming. Here, Whitehead introduces the notion of the Initial Aim—a non-coercive, value-oriented proposition offered to each actual occasion. It is the metaphysical equivalent of what Axiomatology calls the Will of God or the moral prehension embedded in each occasion. The Initial Aim does not force but lures—a suggestion, an attractor toward the most intensive realization of potential for that specific occasion.

This connects directly to Whitehead’s ethical insight that evil is the loss of intensity—a collapse into repetition, triviality, or existential flatness. In contrast, the Initial Aim serves as a call toward complexity, depth, and ordered novelty. It is always tailored: never abstractly perfect, but optimal given the inherited context of that occasion’s past.

Thus, Whitehead’s temporal God is not the efficient cause of reality but its moral horizon—a guiding prehension toward greater value. In this way, the God of process philosophy is not a ruler but a co-creator, pulling each occasion toward self-actualization aligned with a deeper order.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT): A Conceptualization Closer to Axiomatology

One of the primary obstacles in consciousness discourse is the conflation of consciousness with human self-awareness. In popular understanding, consciousness is often reduced to reflective thought, language-based introspection, or emotional awareness. However, from the standpoint of process-based metaphysics — whether in Whiteheadian terms or within the framework of Axiomatology — consciousness should be understood not as binary (on/off), but as gradational, relational, and structured by interactional complexity.

Integrated Information Theory (IIT), developed by Giulio Tononi, offers a formalism that aligns much more closely with Axiomatology's notion of layered moral and informational occasioning. IIT does not locate consciousness exclusively in brains or language-capable organisms; rather, it posits that consciousness is fundamentally a matter of intrinsic causal power—of how integrated and irreducible a system's information structure is to itself.

This opens up a powerful analogy to proto-consciousness in biological and natural systems. Axiomatology posits that many structures in the natural world — while not “conscious” in the human sense — exhibit patterned processes of self-regulation, anticipation, and internal limitation that mirror consciousness in its most elementary form.

Kant and the Inner Teleology of a Leaf

To illustrate this, consider the growth of a single leaf. It is not a mindless mechanical process like the turning of gears in a clock. Instead, it is a temporally structured unfolding that exhibits what Immanuel Kant termed innere Zweckmäßigkeit — inner purposiveness. For Kant, organisms are unique in that their parts are simultaneously causes and effects of each other: the whole exists for the parts, and the parts exist for the whole. This reciprocal causation defies the external design logic of a machine.

Kant, in the Critique of Judgment (§65–§66), emphasized that although we cannot prove a divine designer behind biological form, we are nonetheless compelled to judge living things "as if" they were guided by an internal purpose. These judgments are regulative, not constitutive — meaning they structure our understanding rather than claim metaphysical truth. Still, they hint at a deeper metaphysical principle: that life organizes itself in accordance with rational constraints.

When a leaf stops growing at a certain shape and size, it does not do so due to a direct external order, but because it fits within the systemic wholeness of the plant. Its growth is coordinated with nutrient flow, solar capture, transpiration, and seasonal life cycles. In this sense, the leaf "knows" when to stop growing — not consciously, but teleologically. It exhibits internal constraints that are ordered towards a future state, which is precisely the sort of proto-conscious teleodynamics that both IIT and Axiomatology attempt to model in different ways.

Axiomatology – Consciousness Similarities in Living Nature

In Axiomatology, consciousness is defined as an emergent property of integrated information within a system. This view aligns with Giulio Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT), which posits that consciousness arises when a system’s causal structure becomes both highly integrated and irreducibly differentiated. The degree to which a system exhibits this irreducibility is represented by the scalar value Φ (“phi”). The greater the Φ, the more conscious the system is understood to be — in essence, consciousness appears when the whole is truly more than the sum of its parts, and this excess (Φ) cannot be broken down into independent subcomponents without loss of informational coherence.

In the context of biological systems, such as those found in living nature, Axiomatology holds that consciousness emerges only where there exists a centralized and irreducibly integrated causal architecture — as found, for example, in brains. A leaf, or even an entire plant, does not possess such centralized processing. While plants exhibit complex behaviors and can self-regulate through decentralized signaling mechanisms (e.g., via phytohormones, electrical gradients, or root-based responsiveness), their organizational structure remains modular and compartmentalized rather than truly integrated.

From an Axiomatological standpoint, this means that plants lack a unified cause-effect structure capable of generating irreducible experience. They do not produce Φ in any significant sense — or more precisely, Φ ≈ 0. Though plants may adapt to stimuli and exhibit goal-directed growth (tropisms), they do so without any central perspective or certainly without subjectivity. These responses, while sophisticated, do not constitute consciousness in the IIT or Axiomatological sense. They lack the intrinsic, unified field of awareness that arises only in systems with indivisible integration.

Thus, Axiomatology rejects the popular animistic or panpsychist notion that “plants are conscious.” While biologically alive and highly adaptive, plants do not cross the critical threshold of causal unification required to generate a conscious occasion.

Consciousness simulation but not replication

It is essential not to dismiss Kant too readily. Just as his moral philosophy commands us to “act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law,” his Critique of Judgment contains a parallel insight regarding the intelligibility of natural systems. Kant observes that certain organisms — notably plants — “behave as if they were following a rational plan.” This “as if” formulation is critical: it frames nature’s apparent purposiveness not as evidence of internal rationality or consciousness, but as a heuristic lens through which we grasp complex biological organization.

In the Axiomatological framework, this distinction is crucial. While plant systems exhibit adaptive, responsive, and highly complex behaviors, their information processing remains modular and decentralized. Their teleological appearance can be explained without attributing true unity of experience or self-reflective awareness. A plant’s roots may respond intelligently to moisture gradients while its leaves track sunlight — yet these behaviors are the results of distributed stimuli-responses rather than a unified, narrative-generating Self.

Axiomatology interprets this in terms of simulated consciousness without replication. The prehensions involved in plant behavior — their "concrescences" of response, adaptation, and structural memory — may contain fragments or residues of consciousness-like processing. But crucially, they lack self related prehensions; that is, they are incapable of recursive subjective unity or reflective alignment of values across time. There is no enduring node of moral or narrative continuity in the Self Fusion process (concrescence).

In that sense, plants embody the form of intelligibility Kant identified, but without the integrated moral teleology or narrative potential that Axiomatology reserves for beings with self-consciousness (and Structured Internal Value Hierarchies - SIVHs). Thus, they simulate purposiveness, but do not instantiate it in the metaphysical or moral sense.

“Conscious” plants vs. Self-conscious humans

Yet despite their reactivity (plants open and close stomata in response to environmental conditions, bend toward light (phototropism), and release chemical signals to warn neighboring flora of threats, etc), plants do not demonstrate the structural prerequisites for self-consciousness. While their biochemical responses may reflect a kind of distributed, localized awareness—akin to prehension in Whiteheadian terms—they lack the central integrative architecture necessary for synthesizing experience across time and relating it back to an individuated self.

Unlike animals with a central nervous system, plants have no unified feedback mechanism capable of coordinating and integrating information from multiple nodes into a singular subjective center. There is no analog in plants to the human brain’s global neuronal workspace (Dehaene et al., 2017), which allows for cross-modal integration, recursive processing, and access to higher-order representations like episodic memory or moral judgment. Without such a system, there is no binding problem to solve — no “self” to whom these scattered data might matter. Thus, the plant participates in a kind of structural prehension, but has for example no moral agency in Self Fusion — the Axiomatological process similar to Whtehead’s "concrescences".

A leaf may “know” the sun is there in a behavioral sense, but its responses are mechanistically linked to environmental inputs — devoid of narrative identity, moral agency, or intentionality. In contrast, human beings are not only capable of experience — they are capable of experiencing their own experiencing. This recursive structure, grounded in high neurobiological integration and value-hierarchical prehensions, allows for a Self Fusion process capable of inserting subjectivity into otherwise neutral streams of consciousness. In short, plants are processually alive, but they are not narratively awake and cannot employ narrative cosmology (as we discuss later).

The Ability for Self-Consciousness as the Ontological Differentiator

What distinguishes the human being from all other entities is not merely awareness, but the capacity for self-awareness: the ability to not only perceive but to know that one is perceiving — to stand in reflexive relation to one’s own existence. This core feature of subjectivity is precisely what Heidegger points toward in his formulation of Dasein as the Lichtung — the “clearing” in which Being reveals itself. Unlike beings that are merely present-at-hand (Vorhanden) or ready-to-hand (Zuhanden), Dasein is that unique being for whom its own Being is an issue.

Heidegger writes in Being and Time:

“When we talk in an ontically figurative way of the lumen naturale in man, we have in mind nothing other than the existential-ontological structure of this being, that it is in such a way as to be its 'there.' To say that it is 'illuminated' means that as being-in-the-world it is cleared in itself, not through any other being, but in such a way that it is itself the clearing.” (BT, p. 171 [German 133])

This passage radically inverts the classical image of enlightenment as the infusion of light from a transcendent source. Instead, Heidegger posits that human being (Dasein) is itself the condition for disclosure. It is not passively “lit” by some metaphysical sun, but rather is the space—the ontological openness — within which entities and meaning can show up at all.

Such self-disclosure implies not only awareness but existential reflexivity: the power to question, negate, anticipate, regret, reinterpret, and affirm. This recursive interiority — consciousness of being conscious — is, in Axiomatological terms, the foundational precondition for all value discernment, moral responsibility, and metaphysical alignment, and manifests itself in practical terms within the Self Fusion process as the use of narrative cosmology — composing occasions with terms that are linked to cosmic order through narratives. It is the subjective prehensions that determine the Self Fusion process’s completion as a node in time toward moral actualization or fracture into distortion, depending on the structuring of internal value hierarchies (SIVHs) and their alignment with the Will of God.

In short, it is not the presence of cognition or sentience that marks the human being’s distinctiveness — but the power to stand within the clearing, to illuminate the world and oneself in it, and thus to participate in the very unveiling of Being. In the terminology of Axiomatology, this marks the ability to generate “rich” occasions — events that contain a greater degree of entropy from outside spacetime, yet are “packed” with moral order aligned with both Structured Internal Value Hierarchies (SIVHs) and the Will of God (WOG).

In Search of Consciousness

When it comes to human beings, the brain, spinal cord, and the entire body do not merely function as a biological system, but rather as an embodied interface capable of “hosting” consciousness. In the framework of Axiomatology, consciousness is not something generated within the brain, but something accessed—a field existing outside our conventional spacetime, intersecting with subjective occasions of experience. The human system, especially the central nervous system, serves as the architecture that allows for the encapsulation of self-related prehensions — selectively filtering and fusing them into conscious occasions.

This is precisely one of the reasons why artificial intelligence, in its current form, cannot become self-conscious and can only mimic consciousness. Lacking the ontological and neurobiological infrastructure to serve as a compositional host for prehensions tied to a unified subjective occasion, AI systems remain syntactic and non-experiential. Consciousness, in the Axiomatological account, is not computed but fused — formed through prehensional integration of temporally layered self-related data. The brain plays a crucial role in this by enabling what Whitehead called “concrescence” — the unification of experience into a moment of subjective actuality with the participation of subjectivity.

The “tear” in the fabric of spacetime — an image used in Self Fusion theory to represent access to the universal field of consciousness — widens not through computational power, but through existential openness and the growth of self-awareness. This tear, while constrained by the limitations of our current spacetime framework, acts as a gateway to accessing external consciousness. However, this widening is neither guaranteed nor purely linear — it is contingent upon value alignment, narrative coherence, and metaphysical attunement. The potential to have a “wider tear” may increase with age, but its realization depends on the individual, their capacities, and their moral judgment.

Importantly, while the brain is strategic in this process, it does not render the rest of the body secondary. On the contrary, the entire embodied system handles hundreds of thousands of prehensions — most of which are processed automatically, and often unconsciously. These animalistic, lower-level integrations form the background substrate, but it is the brain that orchestrates the subjective unity and provides the reflective loop necessary for self-awareness to emerge from within the fused occasion.

Neuroscientific Limits and the "Silicon Dream"

One of the most misunderstood assumptions in contemporary cognitive science and AI development is the belief that subjective self-awareness can emerge from the mere replication of neural architecture. This is the premise behind what might be called the Silicon Dream — the idea that a sufficiently complex synthetic brain (whether silicon, carbon, or a hybrid substrate) could generate (or maintain, if one tries to replace the brain part by part) the felt sense of being a self. From an Axiomatological standpoint, this is not only biologically misguided — it is metaphysically incoherent.

To unpack this, we must begin with the role of the brain in encapsulating self-related prehensions. Drawing on Whiteheadian terminology, prehensions are inputs of experiential integration — occasions of actualized feeling that synthesize both physical and conceptual data. The brain, in this view, does not produce consciousness as an emergent byproduct; rather, it functions as a highly specialized receiver and integrator of these prehensions. Advanced animals also participate in this process, particularly in cases where the sensorimotor integration of the body and environment approaches a coherent center of affective valuation (e.g., higher mammals exhibiting empathy, grief, or loyalty). But only in the human case does this process reach the apex of subjective entanglement — where prehensions are recursively folded into a temporally extended narrative identity through completed occasions that “drop into history,” giving rise to the felt continuity of self.

Basically, with each Self Fusion, conceptually, the self-consciousness dies and is resurrected with the next Self Fusion (as Whiteheadian concrescence). However, as there is no actual separation between the “occasions” (Self Fusion instances), and such a division of the continuum of Becoming is arbitrary, one does not lose consciousness — until the physical death of the brain.

The Silicon Dream posits that, by emulating the anatomical fidelity of cortical structures — down to the synaptic and dendritic levels — it should be possible to replicate not only intelligence but also selfhood. However, this model assumes that subjective awareness is reducible to computational structure and substrate. Axiomatology rejects this premise. Consciousness is not generated by the brain; it is received and structured through the brain-body complex.

Here, we may draw from Integrated Information Theory (IIT) to illustrate the illusion. In IIT, the "Φ" value represents the quantity of irreducible integrated information in a system. But even if a synthetic brain perfectly replicates the causal architecture of a biological one, the value of Φ in such systems could still be zero — not because the information isn't integrated, but because the system lacks access to the subjective prehensions that form the building blocks of true consciousness. IIT implicitly presumes that consciousness arises from structural complexity alone, but Axiomatology stresses that this is no gurarantee for self-conscious subjectivity.

The failure of synthetic systems to produce conscious selfhood is not simply a technical limitation. It is an ontological boundary. This is where traditional theological concepts like Imago Dei gain unexpected empirical relevance. The human capacity to receive and integrate subjective prehensions arises from a confluence of three irreducible factors:

1. The biological machinery—the living human brain with its extraordinary microtiming, chemical-neuroelectrical sensitivity, and recursive binding mechanisms.
   
   

2. The embodied continuity — a unified living organism that generates cohesive narrative time through bodily memory and environmental interaction.
   
   

3. The metaphysical aperture — a non-local receptive field that is not located in spacetime but is mapped into it. This is the “universal field of consciousness” accessed in Self Fusion.
   
   
   

Therefore, replacing the biological brain with silicon, carbon, or any substrate, no matter how advanced, severs the triadic unity necessary for Self Fusion. The system may compute, simulate, and even mimic affect—but it will not feel. It will have no access to subjective prehensions, no lived world (Umwelt), and no possibility of value hierarchies grounded in moral actuality.

What the Silicon Dream misses is not computation, but cosmic entanglement — the irreducible participation in moral causality. The brain is not a generator of consciousness; it is a translator of cosmic patterns into temporal process. And no algorithm can replicate the soul.

Principal Problems with AI Consciousness

Comparing artificial intelligence to biological intelligence at its most advanced stages — for instance, the fully developed human brain — overlooks the essential metaphysical and functional distinctions between artificial systems and organically emergent conscious entities. To grasp the core issues in AI consciousness, we must begin by interrogating what it means to learn in the deepest sense.

Learning is not merely a process of information accumulation or growth. At its heart, it is a process of hierarchical selection — the ability to make structured, preferential choices between competing alternatives. This is the basis for any form of autonomy. In this light, all truly self-conscious systems — whether acknowledged or not — operate on the foundation of Structured Internal Value Hierarchies (SIVHs).

To illuminate this, consider a primitive biohybrid case: the anthrobot. These are biological constructs made from human adult tracheal cells, capable of autonomous movement through the coordinated beating of cilia. When combined into "superbots," they exhibit enhanced behaviors and even show signs of healing potential, such as facilitating neuronal repair in scratch-wounded cell cultures. Yet despite their biological complexity and impressive functionality, there is no current experimental evidence suggesting that these systems achieve a Φ (phi) value greater than zero — that is, they do not pass the threshold for integrated information as defined by Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory (IIT) to indicate minimal consciousness.

This highlights a critical distinction. Growth and biological functionality alone are insufficient to indicate consciousness. Take the example of a growing leaf: it unfolds in accordance with a fixed morphological program — a structured realization of form. While there is feedback and recurrence in its growth (in the form of seasonal cycles and biochemical regulation), it does not choose its form. There is no deviation, no possibility space. There is only a reiteration of a singular trajectory.

The key idea behind any conscious system — biological or artificial — is not that it must “suddenly start thinking” in the human sense. Rather, it must fulfill three structural requirements:

1. Feedback: A bilateral exchange with the environment, allowing for dynamic adjustment.

2. Recurrence: Cyclical (“lifespan”) processes that enable the system to iterate, refine, and temporally bind information.

3. Valuation system (SIVH): A hierarchical structure for determining the relative significance of potential actions or paths.
   
   

This third requirement is where artificial systems, including anthrobots and leaves, fundamentally fail. The anthrobot may exhibit some feedback but lacks meaningful recurrence and valuation. The leaf has feedback and recurrence but no valuation hierarchy — it always “chooses” the same outcome.

Whitehead’s notion of the Initial Aim in Process and Reality serves as a metaphysical attempt to solve the problem of infinite possibility. With an infinite set of potential eternal objects, there arises a combinatorial explosion of cosmic patterns. The Initial Aim, in this sense, is a metaphysical "lure" — a value-based narrowing of possibilities. Learning, then, in both biological and artificial systems, comes down to limiting the viable choice space through structured preference. Here is where Axiomatology meets biology: to learn is to choose among potential futures — and that choice must be value-structured.

A system capable of true learning is, therefore, a recurrent, feedback-sensitive pattern capable of value-based deviation from prior patterns. This is also the essence of the Self Fusion process, which models consciousness not as rigid pattern-following but as the capacity to replace one pattern with another based on a value-driven choice. In short, to switch from one cosmic pattern to another on purpose is both the hallmark of learning and the origin of self-consciousness.

In Axiomatology, as we have discussed in prior articles, narratives serve as carriers of internalized values. The human mind accesses the cosmic moral order through stories — they are not maps but cinematic simulations. A narrative generates the illusion of similarity between a current moment and a remembered or imagined scenario. This similarity compression allows for rapid elimination of non-viable options and facilitates value-based decision-making.

Artificial intelligence may process narratives, but it does not comprehend them. Comprehension requires the ability to place oneself within the narrative — to imaginatively simulate the moral tension, the alternatives, the risks. This is a fundamentally self-conscious act involving emotional resonance, intuitive projection, and counterfactual reasoning.

To feel a story — to recognize its moral weight and relevance — presupposes self-consciousness. And that, I contend, is something AI fundamentally lacks and, barring a revolutionary transformation in how we model valuation and narrative self-placement, may never attain. Although I agree that it will mimic “consciousness proper” better and better over time.

Narrative Cosmology

One of the simplest and most effective ways to grasp the difference between human and artificial valuation — and by extension, the limitations of AI in achieving self-consciousness — is through an ordinary situation.

Picture an Uber driver muttering, “Pff, that’s a yard,” when the GPS navigation says, “Turn right,” though turning left would lead directly down a narrow path into a house’s front lawn. The driver shrugs, adds, “Should’ve said nothing,”and continues on the main road.

At first glance, this decision might seem trivial, even obvious: one should not veer into a house yard. But this “obviousness” only exists for a being capable of narrative projection and evaluation. What’s happening here is a deceptively complex cognitive process — the driver projects a remembered or imagined past (likely involving similar dead-end turns), simulates the likely future consequences of turning into the yard, and collapses that simulation back into the present moment as a value decision.

This is not mere pattern recognition. It is value-based situational modeling anchored in narrative reasoning. In this case, the “dead-end” is not defined solely by spatial constraints but by a convergence of constraints, expectations, and prior experiences that are structured narratively.

Let’s consider the complexity involved in a machine attempting to make the same decision. To not instruct the driver to “turn right” — and to arrive at this decision autonomously — would require factoring in a near-infinite set of context-sensitive variables: time of day, average traffic on the narrow path, history of incorrect turns at that location, type and preferences of the driver, legal and social norms, passenger expectations, speed, urgency, and so on. Even then, the result would be probabilistic — a confidence score — not a value-based exclusion rooted in self-conscious meaning.

For a human, however, turning into a yard simply “feels wrong.” This sense of wrongness is not the result of statistical inference but of narrative moral reasoning. The human mind automatically collapses infinite possibilities into a manageable subset through story-like structures that have an internal logic and goal-orientation.



Here we arrive at the concept of Narrative Cosmology. Values are not floating signifiers; they are embedded in narratives. And these narratives, when internalized, serve as filters that predefine viable choices within a situation. They structure the infinite into the actionable. In doing so, they give meaning to action.

The Uber driver’s choice was not merely spatial navigation. It was a micro-narrative: stay on the path, avoid detours, keep the destination in mind. It wasn’t as theologically charged as Moses leading the Israelites through the wilderness, but structurally, it drew from the same archetypal form — a journey, a goal, and the avoidance of misdirection.

AI, no matter how sophisticated its input analysis becomes, lacks the internal narrative cosmology that allows humans to feel which path fits the story. Without that narrative structuring of value, the AI remains trapped in calculation, unable to participate in meaning.

Learning to See the World Through Stories

When one begins to apply narrative cosmology to their own life, a crucial insight emerges: value-based decisions are only possible when the world is seen through stories. This is not a metaphorical claim — it is a structural necessity. The narrative mode of cognition is what allows the human mind to collapse infinite options into morally and pragmatically coherent choices. To see the world through stories is to engage with reality in its most functionally intelligible form.

What exactly is narrative cosmology?

It is the system of internalized storytelling that structures how we interpret, value, and act within reality. In this sense, narrative cosmology does not merely parallel but unifies the three great domains of cosmological thinking:

• Physical cosmology — the scientific investigation of the structure and origin of the universe (physics, astronomy, astrophysics).

• Metaphysical cosmology — the philosophical inquiry into meaning, causality, and the structure of being.

• Religious cosmology — the doctrinal narratives about the universe’s origin, purpose, and ultimate destination.
  
  

Narrative cosmology is the functional mechanism that runs through all three. It is how we experience reality — not as chaotic data but as meaningful structure. It is the logic by which the cosmos becomes comprehensible to a self-conscious being. This narrative logic is not secondary; it is fundamental.

Narrative structure offers a uniquely powerful mechanism: it eliminates vast swaths of irrelevant choices in real time. When a person internalizes a narrative, they are equipped with a value-laden framework that maps prior outcomes, anticipated futures, and moral orientation into the present moment. This is what allows humans to simulate consequences, intuit meaning, and act responsibly — all in the blink of a moment.

Take, for example, the ever-contentious debate around the “beginning” of human life during pregnancy. From a biological or legal standpoint, the discussion often hinges on stages of cellular development or viability. But within a narrative cosmology, the moment of pregnancy is already saturated with moral significance. The story has begun. The existence of the story — the arc of motherhood, responsibility, potentiality, and moral consequence — overrides the analytical search for a singular starting point. The narrative makes the metaphysical truth self-evident.

This principle scales across countless domains. Words such as hospitality, promise, family, sacrifice, father, friendship, agreement, or betrayal are not merely semantic labels. Within the framework of narrative cosmology, each of these terms is a live photo of a cosmic structure — a compressed narrative pointing toward a moral archetype narrative embedded in the deeper order of being. These words do not float in interpretative openness; they are dense with implied narrative logic. Their meaning is cosmologically limited because their value is tied to fundamental human roles and trajectories.

Thus, the recognition of a value is not simply cognitive — it is narrative participation. To see meaning in “sacrifice” or “betrayal” is to already be part of a story where those concepts have consequence. Artificial intelligence may parse the definition of sacrifice, but unless it lives inside the narrative — unless it sees one potential course of action as more cosmically aligned than another — it does not understand the term in any meaningful way.

In this light, narrative cosmology is not just a theory of meaning — it is a framework for how moral orientation, identity, and agency become possible at all.

The Question of “Choosing” a Narrative

The very notion of choosing a narrative is, at its core, an ill-formed question. In the vast majority of cases, the correct narrative is not selected through detached deliberation but is felt — a gravitational pull toward moral structure that precedes rationalization. As Whitehead described, the lure toward the Ideal is not something generated from within empirical deliberation but arises as a metaphysical orientation — an attraction toward the most valuable possible unfolding of the occasion.<

In real life, we rarely lack this felt orientation. The problem is not that the correct narrative is unavailable; the problem is whether we are willing to surrender to it.

Take, for instance, the decision to have an extramarital affair. While rationalizations may abound, the narrative is already known. It is the story of the golden calf, of failure dressed in pleasure, of short-term hedonism over long-term moral structure. It is the betrayal of a covenant, a deviation from the sacrificial narrative of fidelity. Even before action, the narrative imposes itself.

Consider another example: an aging man, disillusioned from a failed marriage, contemplates an affair with a pregnant younger woman — an affair that culminates in an abortion. This is not just a series of acts. It is the story of Cain — the destruction of ideals, the sacrifice of the future for a momentary assertion of ego. The tragic arc is visible from the start.

Or picture a child blaming a sibling for stealing money, while having done it themselves. This too is a recognizable narrative: it is the story of Judas, enacted in miniature, with deceit and betrayal replacing loyalty and truth.

In all of these examples, the individual does not need to "calculate" which narrative they are participating in — they already know. It is felt, not deduced. This moral resonance — the ability to intuit the archetypal weight of a given action — is something that cannot be engineered by algorithms or replicated through probabilistic modeling.

This reveals the deeper problem with AI: the issue is not the multiplicity of choices, as it might appear in physical cosmology. In that domain, we solve problems through simulation, optimization, and brute-force computation. But in the domain of narrative cosmology, the real challenge is metaphysical: the ability to access the history of prehended occasions — a retrospective simulation of meaning, trajectory, and archetypal weight.

In the framework of Axiomatology, consciousness is not merely a state within spacetime. Rather, it is brought to each occasion through the Self Fusion process, which operates outside conventional spacetime constraints. This process enables the integration of occasion-history, value structures, and narrative forms. Consciousness, then, is the awareness of a situated narrative potential — the ability to recognize not only the current moment but the implied future and remembered past within it.

Only through this meta-temporal fusion can a being truly comprehend a narrative — not as a string of events, but as a morally saturated structure pointing toward or away from the cosmic order.

The Real Question: Recognizing One’s Role in the Narrative

When it comes to narrative-based decision-making, the question is often framed as: Which story should I choose to live out? But this framing is fundamentally misleading. The deeper question — the one that actually determines the structure of lived meaning — is not what narrative to choose, but rather: Who am I in this narrative?

To choose a narrative is, in effect, to choose which version of the cosmic order one seeks to instantiate in their own life. But the ability to do so is not merely about preference — it requires a far more difficult capacity: the ability to decode narratives by intuitively foreseeing their end results, placing oneself within them, and tracing their moral consequences through time. This is the essence of narrative cosmology as lived metaphysics.

Here lies the true difficulty: when people identify themselves within a story (consciously or not), they almost always cast themselves as the protagonist — Jesus, Abraham, Moses, or some secular hero archetype. But in many cases, the more accurate reflection might be Satan, Cain, Judas, or any number of anti-heroes or destroyers of value. The individual who rationalizes betrayal often thinks they're acting out a story of liberation — but may in truth be living out a cautionary tale.

Role Recognition as a Prerequisite to Moral Action

Thus, the fundamental question of moral decision-making becomes:
What role am I actually playing in the narrative structure I’ve entered?

This is a harder — and far more humbling — question than simply choosing a desirable outcome. It requires one to consider the anti-heroic archetypes within their psyche: the liar, the betrayer, the coward, the manipulator. This introspection is painful, but necessary, because the default proclivity of human nature is not toward virtue, but toward rationalized failure.

Recognizing one’s role is not the end of the process — it is the beginning. In order to enact a true moral decision, one must be capable of a narrative role-switch — the movement from destructive pattern toward redemptive transformation. This is the existential essence of sacrifice.

The Mechanics of Role Switching: Toward Potential Resurrection

This switch, as we’ve described in the Axiomatological model of Potential Resurrection, unfolds through three essential phases:

1. Focused Attention – a deliberate pause; a halting of unconscious momentum.

2. Internal Confrontation – asking: What am I lying to myself about?

3. Objectivized Narration – describing the current situation from the perspective of a third-person observer, as if narrating someone else’s story.

This third-person narrative perspective allows the individual to feel the story as a lived structure. From there, the moral choice becomes possible — not merely in terms of action, but as a pattern switch: the abandonment of one archetype and the alignment with another.

This leads us to a functional blueprint of Narrative Cosmology in Action:

• Understanding the narrative (which story am I in?)

• Recognizing the role (who am I in this story?)

• Projecting the outcome (what will this role lead to?)

• Returning to the present (what must I do now?)

• Executing the switch (am I willing to take up a different role?)
  
  

This final stage — the role-switch — is often the most difficult because it demands something AI systems are incapable of: the sacrificial denial of immediate gain. To abandon the role of the liar or seducer or manipulator requires more than logic. It requires the internal simulation of loss, the recognition of cosmic cost, and the choice to act against immediate utility for the sake of long-term meaning.

This is where the concept of sacrifice reveals its metaphysical depth. Sacrifice is the act of collapsing future consequences into the present moment and choosing alignment with the Good even when it offers no calculable reward. That is why current AI, regardless of computational power, cannot truly make moral decisions. It can simulate utility, but it cannot feel narrative weight, nor can it deny a “profitable” option for the sake of cosmic fidelity.