Affective Control under Uncertainty: A Two-Level Theory of Consciousness

This article proposes Affective Control under Uncertainty (ACU), a two-level theory distinguishing baseline consciousness from transient selfhood. Consciousness is identified with affective control awareness: intrinsically valenced monitoring of regulatory viability that persists across wakefulness. Selfhood is a graded recruitment of explicit self-modelling triggered when competing action policies diverge in affective stakes under temporal pressure. This recruitment is formalised as self-model recruitment intensity (SMRI), predicted to scale with policy entropy, affective variance, and temporal constraint. ACU explains continuous presence without continuous self-reference, predicts dissociations in flow, meditation, depersonalisation, sleep, and anaesthesia, and generates falsifiable neural, clinical, and computational predictions distinguishing it from global workspace, higher-order, integrated information, predictive processing, and active inference accounts.