Clayton Maki

This paper develops a physicalist, architecture-relative account of interiority, selfhood, and the felt authority of conscious experience. It rejects the common picture of a biological machine joined to a separate inner observer. The self is treated instead as an inseparable component of a recursive regulator: a continuously updated self-model that coordinates bodily state, memory, attention, action, and social report under bandwidth, delay, and survival constraints. The central claim is that reportability is not the full process that produces experience or action. What feels like “reality” is the lived consequence of commitment convergence. Distributed hypotheses and policies compete across the organism; one configuration gains sufficient stability, precision, and downstream coupling to organize attention and action while suppressing alternatives. The report layer receives and communicates a compressed representation of that convergence. It therefore functions primarily as a validation and coordination surface rather than as a detached inner commander or the sole origin of agency. Interiority is treated as graded and architecture-relative. Minimal interiority begins with autopoietic self-maintenance and intrinsic normativity: internal differences matter to a system because they affect its continued viability. Reflective human consciousness requires additional organization, including recursive self-modeling, temporally integrated competition among interpretations and policies, commitment under constraint, and stabilized access for report. This places the proposal near enactivism, predictive processing and active inference, biological naturalism, and global-workspace approaches while giving greater emphasis to the transition from distributed processing to action-binding commitment. The framework also explains why dreams, hallucinations, dissociation, and psychedelic states can feel real. Their contents need not originate from accurate external models; they need only achieve sufficient internal convergence under altered precision, integration, and boundary conditions. Agency is likewise preserved without locating freedom in a moment of conscious initiation: the relevant agent is the whole recursive organism, which can model alternatives, act, learn from consequences, and alter future convergence. Generative AI provides a contemporary stress test. Fluent, report-shaped outputs can enter human cognition near the level at which integrated conclusions are normally presented, encouraging premature authority before slower verification and embodied consequence can recalibrate commitment. The proposal does not require nonphysical substances or exotic physics. It offers an architectural synthesis and a research program: formalize commitment convergence, distinguish report from the broader regulatory state, identify measurable correlates of representational authority and reality-feel, and test how viability, precision, hysteresis, and downstream coupling govern the transition from competing possibilities to experienced certainty.

Clayton Maki is a small-business owner, welder, and fabricator based in Tucson, Arizona. He independently studies consciousness, reportability, and self-modeling, and is developing an unpublished manuscript, The Civic Prism, exploring how biological and social systems respond to constraint, maintain coherence, and break down. His practical background informs his interest in architecture, regulation, feedback, and complex systems