AIM Framework glossary
Conscious Cognition
Canonical definition
Conscious Cognition is the full operation of the components of the Minimal Architecture Specification during the Individual’s waking phenomenological experience: the Body Manager signalling deficit, the Observer assessing Salience over the perceived Object field conditioned on the Belief Register, and the Thinker maintaining priors and resolving what it attends to, the three of them supplying signed input to the Decision Hub, which integrates them into a tag-stripped Scalar and selects action, with that Scalar returning to the Thinker as the evidence on which the next resolution runs. Conscious Cognition is therefore the operation of the whole architecture and not of any one component. The Thinker's contribution to it comprises two operations: Imagination, which constructs candidate Hypotheses from Knowledge held in the Memory Store and delivers them into the representable Hypothesis Space without scoring them, and Ground-Resolution, which redistributes probability mass across Hypotheses in according to incoming evidence and the interference term, under the rule stated at Axiom 8. The outputs of the Thinker's contribution are distinguished by two features: whether contains the true generative Hypothesis H*, and the magnitude of the interference term (doubt) sustained at the moment of output. I-Override is Ground-Resolution run deliberately on the source of the Individual's own valuation, with the interference term sustained and the Hypothesis Space expanded to admit the Mimetic Hypothesis, and I-Override runs Imagination, because that expansion is what the generative operation performs. Confabulation is an output rather than an operation: a Hypothesis Ground-Resolution has returned that is sincere and wrong. Ground-Resolution is recruited by an unresolved or mispredicted Object rather than running on every cycle; where the Belief Register can already resolve the context, action-selection proceeds by Habit without recruiting the Thinker, and Conscious Cognition continues, because the other components go on operating. The felt presence of that recruitment is Curiosity and the felt registration of its exhaustion is Boredom. Dreams-and-Sleep Bracket. Conscious Cognition names the always-on generative process operative during waking phenomenological experience, which is the scope relevant to motivation and decision-making. The same neural substrate that supports Conscious Cognition also generates dream states during sleep. Because the AIM Framework treats the conscious experience of the Individual as phenomenologically real, dream experience is likewise phenomenologically real, operating on a register distinct from waking Belief, waking hypothetical, and waking source-attribution. Dreams lie outside the motivational scope of this treatise but are not denied reality.
Explanation
Conscious Cognition is everything the architecture does while the Individual is awake, and not the name for thinking alone. The body reports what it needs, the Observer reads the field and marks what matters, the Thinker works things out, all three feed the Decision Hub, and the Decision Hub combines them into one signal and acts on it. Thinking is one contribution to that, not the whole of it. The Thinker's own share has two moving parts. One builds candidate ideas out of what the Individual already knows and puts them up for consideration without deciding anything about them, and that part is Imagination. The other weighs the candidates against the evidence and settles on the best-supported one, and that part is Ground-Resolution. What is commonly treated as a further mental faculty is one of these two, or something one of them produced. I-Override is the weighing part turned deliberately on the question of why you want what you want, held open with doubt sustained and the list of explanations widened to include social copying; I-Override runs the generating part, because widening the list is what generating does. Confabulation is not a faculty but a result: an answer the weighing part returned sincerely that happens to be wrong. Nothing separates a Belief from an idea being entertained except the weight the engine has put on it and the doubt it is holding against it, and the same Hypothesis moves from entertained to considered to believed as evidence accumulates, and back again under doubt.
Epistemic status
Framework-Specific Construct.