An apple accelerates under gravity. Every prior instant of the gravitational field is perfectly preserved in its present velocity—nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten. Yet the apple is not conscious. It does not learn, attend, or remember in any felt sense. What it lacks is not contact with the world, but a certain kind of contact with itself.
Consciousness lies at the opposite pole: vivid, self-modulating, historically deep. The difference is whether a system’s own past loops back to push against its present—reinforcing along some dimensions, opposing along others, and in that interplay reshaping what comes next. Call this interplay reciprocation.
Between the apple and a conscious mind lies a continuous thickening of the same operations. This paper develops a geometric framework—a dynamics of complex-valued vectors on unit hyperspheres—that makes this thickening precise. It argues that the structure of phenomenal experienc