Homeostatic and Affective Additional Theories

Belciug’s Bounded Valenced Integrated Control

Independent researcher Filip Belciug’s Bounded Valenced Integrated Control (BVIC) theory proposes that, in humans and similar embodied organisms, consciousness is the first-person, lived form of bounded, valenced, integrated organism-level control. Experience is not a second product added to biological functioning; it is the mode in which a self-maintaining organism integrates body, world, value, memory, attention, and action as its own regulatory perspective (Belciug, 2026).

BVIC is an identity-emergence theory. It is an identity theory because consciousness is identified with the first-person form of integrated valenced control, not merely with a correlate or output of that control. It is an emergence theory because this identity arises only after evolutionary and developmental layering: homeostasis, nociception, affect, interoception, perception, memory, self-modeling, attention, and flexible action.

As a Homeostatic and Affective theory, BVIC shares with Damasio, Solms, Seth, and Friston the view that consciousness cannot be understood apart from bodily regulation, affect, and organismic self-maintenance. Its proposed refinement is to specify an identity condition: feeling is what priority becomes when the prioritized state is the bounded organism itself, globally integrated as its own regulatory condition.

The theory has seven principal features: boundedness, self-maintenance, valence, integration, control, temporal continuity, and low maladaptive fragmentation. Its two most distinctive increments are the fragmentation/degradation dimension and the separation of conscious unity from signal complexity. A vivid psychedelic or dissociative state may be rich in contents while less unified as organism-level control. Belciug’s proposed Synchronized Multisystem Integration Index (SMII) is a pre-formal heuristic: synchrony and integration support conscious unity, while maladaptive fragmentation degrades it.

For AI consciousness, BVIC raises the bar: intelligence, reportability, language, and optimization are insufficient unless an artificial system has intrinsic relevance — states that matter to its own ongoing regulation. The theory remains provisional, requiring operational thresholds, neural mapping, and mathematical formalization.

Reference

Belciug, F. (2026). Consciousness as Bounded Valenced Integrated Control: An Identity-Emergence Theory of Human Subjective Experience. Zenodo. https://zenodo.org/records/20518782.