How a System is Intelligible From the Inside: Reframing Consciousness, Time, and Explanation

This conceptual sketch and overview proposes a unified theoretical framework for consciousness grounded in the principles of recursive temporal coherence, metabolic regulation, and categorical structure. It argues that conscious experience emerges not from symbolic computation or representational content alone, but from the system’s ability to maintain internal intelligibility across nested timescales under constraint. Drawing from the Free Energy Principle, Global Workspace Theory, embodied cognition, and astrocyte-mediated neurometabolic gating, the theory reconceptualizes subjectivity as the dynamic convergence of predictive accuracy, metabolic viability, and self-referential structural alignment. At the formal core of this framework is category theory, which provides the minimal syntax for expressing coherence-preserving transformations, including limits (the "present moment"), colimits (narrative selfhood), functors (cross-scale translation), and the Yoneda Lemma (identity as relational closure). By treating consciousness as a structurally enacted, metabolically gated, and recursively self-stabilizing temporal attractor, this account reframes the hard problem: not as a mystery beyond mechanism, but as what it feels like for a system to successfully preserve its own coherence over time. It's a blueprint for understanding consciousness as the active structuring of time from within. Questions or comments can be emailed to [email protected]