Thermodynamic Constraints on the Self-Consciousness Architecture: Integrating Damasian Selfhood with Metabolic Correlates of Conscious States

Antonio Damasio’s architecture of selfhood distinguishes a core self — a moment-to-moment, embodied sense of being a subject of experience — from an autobiographical self, built over time through memory, social context, and narrative integration. The architecture is grounded in an extensive clinical and lesion literature, but it is loosely formalized: it specifies which functions cluster together and the clinical order in which they dissociate, without deriving that order from a stated physical constraint, and consequently generates few quantitative predictions that could falsify it. Separately, neuroimaging of altered and recovering consciousness has established that conscious states carry measurable, regionally specific metabolic cost, and that the posteromedial cortex implicated in autobiographical selfhood is both the earliest site of hypometabolism in Alzheimer’s disease and among the last regions to reintegrate during emergence from anesthesia. This paper does not report a new empirical finding. It proposes that the Damasian hierarchy is thermodynamically conditioned — that layers of selfhood requiring broader network integration impose greater and more fragile energetic demand — and argues that formalizing the architecture in these terms converts a descriptive clinical taxonomy into a framework yielding specific, falsifiable predictions about the order of loss and recovery of selfhood. The convergent evidence is reviewed, three such predictions are stated, and the boundary conditions under which the framework would fail are identified.