RustKite Thanks for the thoughtful question.
To keep the idea from feeling too abstract, I used neuroprosthetic embodiment as a concrete example, because it shows how phenomenological, mechanistic, and normative frameworks about consciousness come together to produce something like intentional awareness.
Though a seemingly unlikely example at first glance, it highlights something important: a neuroprosthetic can generate its own layer of experience. In these systems, a person interacts with an external object that’s literally wired into their body. They see it, control it, and feel it as part of a single loop. When the “subjective” and “objective” sides fuse into one feedback process, the old Cartesian split doesn’t really hold anymore—you get this relational, embodied kind of awareness, almost like an add-on consciousness.
In the hierarchy, life emerges between the Quantum and Biochemical scales—where self-sustaining biochemical cycles arise from quantum fluctuations. Bioelectrical activity comes later, once cellular membranes evolve and coordinating signals over distance becomes possible. Consciousness, in this picture, appears much later still. The result of many layers gradually constraining each other in increasingly structured ways.
We can actually study this gradual tightening of constraints across scales experimentally. To track the transitions, you can imagine a multi-stage experimental chain that can be broken into micro-to-meso and meso-to-macro evaluations. At the smallest scales, engineered spin-sensitive proteins or magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) could subtly bias quantum or spin-dependent events, effectively translating them into local chemical or ion-channel changes that neurons can respond to. These micro-to-meso effects could be read out in cultured neurons or brain slices using patch-clamp, calcium imaging, or NV-diamond sensors.
For meso-to-macro scales, closed-loop BCIs and neuroprosthetics provide a transparent system for measuring interactions across neural, cognitive, and experiential scales. When combined with analytical frameworks like Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT), Predictive Processing (PP), and Perturbational Complexity Index (PCI)—measured via Lempel-Ziv compressibility with EEG combined with TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation)—we can quantify how integration, global accessibility, prediction, and feedback change as a hybrid human–machine system becomes more integrated. I assume that by using this EEG-TMS approach in combination with MNPs, we could specifically measure PCI.
TMS perturbs the brain at the network level; EEG records the brain’s response; PCI (via Lempel-Ziv) quantifies the complexity/integration of that response.
MNPs are not directly measured by TMS/EEG—instead, you look for differences in the brain’s response to TMS when the micro manipulation (MNP) is turned ON vs OFF.
In short: micro → (transduce) → neuron → network → PCI change.
If network-level changes follow the applied spin manipulations in a reversible way that can’t be explained by heating or chemical effects, this would provide suggestive evidence linking quantum-scale dynamics to higher-order network activity and, ultimately, conscious processes.
