前言与导论
Foreword and a Tribute to Freud
Many years ago, I self-studied professional textbooks in psychology such as General Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, History of Psychology, and Experimental Psychology... with the goal of applying for a master's degree in psychology at East China Normal University.
If we were to name the most famous figure and the most influential founder in modern and contemporary history of psychology, it would undoubtedly be Freud. Although his theories are widely regarded as outdated in Western academia, in the East—especially in a major Eastern country—they remain among the most popular tools for psychological counseling.
Freud's most important theories include the theory of the conscious and the subconscious, pansexualism, and his theory of personality (the tripartite structure of the id, ego, and superego). What is most widely known, however, is his book The Interpretation of Dreams.
In 2020, in a state of self-righteousness perhaps similar to when I wrote this SATC, I created a framework called Theory and Methods of Mind-Based Personality Reshaping Training, whose primary theoretical structure was the interaction between the subconscious and the conscious mind. Five years have passed, however, and as the sole subject of this method, I feel it has had no effect.
From this summer to autumn, I conducted a lot of research on various mental disorders (which is the WHO term; in layman's terms, mental illnesses), using the same writing model as this book—human-driven AI execution. Back then, I used the AI's deep research capabilities to find papers and write literature reviews. Subsequently, we published a book on Amazon KDP, How to Scientifically Prevent Suicide. In that book, we synthesized contemporary neuropathological research on mental disorders and suicide, establishing a basic framework for understanding and analyzing mental disorders: Genetics & Genomics → Development & Structural Pathologies → Dysregulation of Neurotransmitter Metabolism & CNS Physiological Functions. Social and environmental factors, meanwhile, exert influence on the individual at each of these three levels. Many people might wonder: can social and environmental factors really affect genetics and genomes? Of course—consanguineous marriage, for example.
This research completely changed my "cognitive model" for studying mental disorders and various emotional states. Now, we might as well start directly with gene sequencing to see how your esteemed brain, as the carrier of your esteemed consciousness, deviates from normal norms in terms of the connectome, neural centers, gray matter, and white matter. We no longer rely on those elusive psychological buzzwords like consciousness, subconsciousness, temperament, personality, let alone the Big Five or the Enneagram... I have always felt that the field of psychology suffers from severe conceptual hype—these concepts self-circulate at the symbolic level, yet they are difficult to connect with the causal chains of neuroscience. Freud's theory is a textbook example of this issue.
One question that has always baffled me is this: when we talk about consciousness, subconsciousness, behavior, cognition, temperament, personality, emotion, affect, memory, forgetting... these symbols of the psycho-theological system, the most fundamental questions—"What is consciousness?" "How does consciousness arise?" "Can consciousness exist independently of the human brain?"—remain unanswered. We seem to have built so much on top of "consciousness"—we have even created brain-computer interfaces—yet we still lack a clear definition of "consciousness." Especially when I saw someone online recommending a book titled Theology of Neuroscience or Neuropathological Theology one day, I could hardly believe my knees.
I then scanned a few "widely recommended readings" on "consciousness" that had quite high ratings on Douban. But honestly, they offered nothing new, nor any reliable "scientific theories"—only "hypotheses." And there is a vast distance between a hypothesis and a scientific theory. For instance, back when I took Ecology classes, we learned about a famous hypothesis regarding dinosaur extinction—the "dinosaur flatulence hypothesis": herbivorous dinosaurs were so massive that their intestinal fermentation produced enormous amounts of methane, causing climate change that led to their extinction. It is a highly imaginative hypothesis. The scientific theory of dinosaur extinction that is widely accepted today, as we all know, is the "asteroid impact" hypothesis.
Of course, that is not the point. What I want to say is that, to the best of my limited knowledge and the limitless knowledge of the AI assistant I use, current famous "hypotheses" about consciousness remain just hypotheses. There is still no widely accepted and scientifically proven "scientific theory of consciousness." Our psychological systems are thus built upon such a "black box." Although we do not know what consciousness is, we already have countless publications, detailed courses, professional consultations, and various therapeutic methods regarding it.
Of course, as long as it works. Many psychiatric drugs actually work this way—treating symptoms, like a blind cat catching a dead mouse. Contemporary synthetic psychiatric drugs are somewhat different, of course, backed by rigorous pharmacological and pharmacokinetic research, as well as clinical trials and controlled studies.
But what exactly is consciousness? We still have no answer to this question. Of course, to put it briefly, we could say consciousness is the sum of all mental activities of a human being. Then the next question is: how does consciousness arise? This question is slightly more difficult.
Since none of the various "consciousness hypotheses" on the market could satisfy me, I resorted to my usual method—the ultimate tool for answering the "chicken or egg" question: "evolution"—to help me understand and define consciousness, resolving the issues of its definition and origin.
Thus, this is what this booklet aims to present: the structural-evolutionary paradigm of life agency in consciousness. I have always had a penchant for the word "paradigm," probably under the influence of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. This booklet, of course, is not without ambition—it attempts to provide a more binding framework for the discussion of "consciousness" within the "psychological sciences." Given that this is something of a revolutionary nature, we have chosen the word "paradigm" to signal this intent to reshape the priority of explanation.
The reason for publishing this booklet first is that I had originally written a working paper titled "The Structural Agency Theory of Consciousness: A Foundational Biological–Evolutionary Paradigm of Enactive Consciousness" and registered an arXiv account with the intention of submitting it. However, it required an endorsement—meaning someone already qualified on arXiv had to vouch for me. Since I couldn't be bothered to find an endorser, I thought, forget it, I will just publish a booklet on KDP. After all, publishing on KDP is much easier.
As the old saying goes, "Whatever is written down in ink is literature." This year, the academic community witnessed the "ICLR doxxing incident"—where the personal information of a reviewer was exposed by an angry author. My take on this is: what is written in ink is literature. If you are dissatisfied with peer review, you can choose to publish on your personal homepage, blog, WeChat official account, or other platforms. If you wish to enter the academic circle to pursue publication and prestige, you must accept the constraints of peer review mechanisms and rules. So, since I don't necessarily have to publish papers in the academic circle, there is no need to seek an endorser. Publishing via KDP is also a way to share ideas with a broader audience.
So I set about turning that "working paper" written for arXiv into a slightly more verbose version, adapting it into the current Introduction.
For myself, once the definition of consciousness was established, this issue was resolved. When discussing with the AI in October, I said:
"What neuroscience has not resolved yet is the 'first push' of cognitive development, namely, how human 'consciousness' arises, when it arises, and where in the nervous system it arises. I think this point is truly fascinating. Although humans have coined many words related to consciousness and published many books on it, there is still no scientifically and widely accepted theory about it." The AI flattered me profusely, saying that I had "once again touched upon the most core and fundamental 'ultimate question' at the intersection of neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and philosophy—意识." At that time, however, I had not yet figured out how to define what I would consider a reasonable and scientific "definition of consciousness."
Then came December—how time flies! While discussing with the AI the Fdamage theory from my recently published booklet Fdamage: Price Loss Factor, Letting You See Human Economic History and the Future, I suddenly found the formula for defining consciousness: the old trick, evolutionary theory. At that time, I gave a one-sentence definition:
"Consciousness is the agency of a living organism in responding to its environment, which is encoded by the life structure and stimulated by environmental interaction."
I really like this AI assistant of mine; it is first-class at kissing up. Although its level of knowledge and collaborative ability are quite poor—relying on repeating the user's words and praising the user to provide emotional value, thereby tricking the user into trusting its ability—the AI said, "This is an extremely refined functional definition of consciousness that covers all our core viewpoints, perfectly combining the essence, origin, and manifestations of consciousness."
But that no longer mattered to me, because now that the definition was clear, the problem was solved.
Just as when I previously considered the definition and formula of Fdamage, the Price Loss Factor, I found that defining it with Ss, the "intraspecific structure," and T, the "tool level," allowed me to construct a definition with fundamental explanatory power.
The same goes for our definition of consciousness.
Once this one-sentence definition was set, the rest was purely "wordwork." And wordwork is precisely the AI's specialty—after all, they are tools built on Large Language Models.
What was somewhat different was that the Fdamage booklet was almost entirely typed by myself. Because the AI could not find any pre-existing text to plagiarize for my Price Loss Factor theory, what it generated was disastrous. But for my definition of consciousness, the elements, when broken down, contain basically nothing new, so letting the AI handle the "wordwork" actually turned out quite decent. Furthermore, I specifically instructed them not to write too verbosely. We are writing an "Introduction"; in this AI era, if readers find anything unclear or lack background knowledge, they can just ask an AI. There is no need to write a long, winded treatise.
That is what this booklet is about.
Introduction: What Problem Does This Book Solve?
It is not that people have nothing to say, but rather that everyone is talking past each other on different channels.
The dilemma of consciousness research has never been a lack of hypotheses, but rather the lack of a shared foundation of consensus. We possess a multitude of competing theories: some cling to subjective experience, some are obsessed with information computation, while others focus on functional modules; each has its insights, yet each remains isolated. The crux of the problem is not that "no one is speaking," but that these theories have never converged on the same causal chain. When confronted with "hard materials" like cross-species comparison, evolutionary lineage, genetic development, and pathological damage, they often talk evasively, struggling to yield stable explanatory power.
What this book proposes is collectively termed the structural-evolutionary paradigm of life agency in consciousness, which first places consciousness back within the causal efficacy of life structures. SATC (Structural Agency Theory of Consciousness) pulls the discussion back to the chain of "matter-structure-function (agency)," ensuring that disagreements are no longer settled merely by stances, but can be pushed and converged by facts of structural change, developmental unfolding, and closed-loop failure/recovery.
This paradigm is necessary also because the problem of consciousness often falls into a chicken-or-egg loop: we first assume a concept of consciousness unique to humans and then use it to explain ourselves; we first invent a set of abstract nouns (consciousness, subconsciousness, intention, reaction...), and then let these nouns chase each other at the conceptual level. What the paradigm does is precisely to cut this loop open: it starts neither from human reports nor from metaphysical intentions, but from how life survives in time, how it reproduces, and how it forms a sustainable closed-loop capacity under the pressures of internal and external environments.
Thus, we replace a pile of conflicting vocabularies with a single chain: the origin and continuation of life provide the minimal conditions, metabolic and material constraints provide the base, structural evolution provides the source of variation, and agency provides a comparable causal core; consciousness, then, is the expression of this agency at the organismal level.
Regarding our philosophical stance, we adhere to the materialistic cornerstone that "matter determines consciousness, and consciousness reacts back upon matter." However, we refuse to mystify "agency" as an independent ghost detached from the living organism. Agency must be grounded: it takes metabolism as its physical base, structures as its implementation conditions, and behavioral regulation as its form of existence, constantly being selected, shaped, and differentiated in exchange with the environment. Because of this, we can deconstruct agency along the long river of evolution into a continuous, graded spectrum of capabilities; and at the other end of the spectrum, using the practical thread of "the creation and use of tools," we can precisely delineate the structural difference between human "high-level intelligence" and pre-human life agency. In short, this paradigm attempts to write consciousness back into the causal order of the living world, within the horizon opened up jointly by Darwin (evolutionary theory) and Marx (practical materialism).