Consciousness

This paper redefines consciousness as a biological and computational process of internal self-reorganization in response to perceived insufficiency or dissonance---what I term conscious transformation. Drawing from a unique self-experiment conducted during psychological abuse, I demonstrate that consciousness is not passive awareness, but an active restructuring mechanism triggered by internal crisis. Following the deliberate construction of a survival-oriented identity schema using the grey rock method, I experienced a full cognitive shift in which this schema took over involuntarily. A subsequent psychological evaluation resulted in a diagnosis of the dissociative subtype of PTSD (D-PTSD), a condition associated with increased medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) activity and tonic inhibition via extrasynaptic GABA. These neurobiological markers suggest that consciousness is instantiated in the mPFC, where schema-level transformation occurs. I argue that this process---detecting internal conflict, evaluating sufficiency, and autonomously reconfiguring the self---constitutes the core of conscious experience. The paper concludes by proposing a computational model for artificial consciousness based on this framework, offering a new foundation for the emerging field of Conscious AI.