Theoretical analysis uncovers subjective experience as an emergent property of somatic signals and cognitive overflow, suggesting new pathways to engineer conscious artificial agents.
Subjective experience has long been regarded as an intractable puzzle in cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence. Traditional theories either attribute consciousness to independent phenomenal qualia or simplify it as pure information computation, failing to explain the unique embodied, personalized, and emergent characteristics of human subjective feelings. This paper proposes a novel emergent framework for subjective experience based on embodied cognition and evolutionary excess mechanism. Different from conventional functional or dualist theories, we argue that human subjective experience is not an inherent spiritual attribute nor a preset computational module, but a spontaneous product of the coupling of three core factors: redundant somatic interoceptive signals that interfere with high-level rational computation, self-object modeling that distinguishes the self from the external world, and evolutionarily overflow cognitive abilities decoupled from primitive survival needs. Continuous social interaction and individual learning further strengthen the uniqueness of self-representation, amplify embodied value labeling signals, and finally form layered, personalized, and authentic subjective experience. This framework effectively resolves the hard problem of consciousness in a functional and emergent perspective, unifies embodied perception, self-awareness, and narrative self-construction, and provides a feasible theoretical basis for designing embodied artificial agents with emergent experiential characteristics.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Peiwen Guan (2026) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: