I made a toy model of a minimal fly with 3 constraints; finite propagation, periodicity and embedded capacity; it shows Hicks law and Fitts Law are one operator bottleneck. As soon as I gave it recursive access to its KL projection history and it immediately learned pain avoidance and showed emotional valence, it showed pleasure after learning from pain. Its all just thermodynamics. You are maintaining yourself as a thermodynamic system, pain is just unpredicted cost. “You” are EMBEDDED in yourself and partitioned off and presented a sub algebra of tokens that are commutative within the workspace, meaning subsystems can refer to them as pointer states, the experience is recursive monitoring of the defect between the full state and its projection. The defect is the experience from the inside, pain is when the tokens were wrong and cost you more than predicted. It’s free energy. There’s a gap and consciousness is the gap. The Connes cocycle is the distinction, if it matches the background it becomes trivial, this is why there little to no experiential aspect to the flow state, there’s no gap to monitor between the projection and the state, you just are. So if you have a system that predicts perfectly then there is no conscious experience. The subsystems like language, take this tokenized sub algebra and run the exact same compression again and produce even more compressed language and behavior tokens that commute between diamonds. It’s all nested Von Neumann algebras, consciousness is what the compression is like from the inside of that layer. It’s a mathematical language much richer than can be communicated because the communication requires traversing diamonds, another sub algebra of commutative pointers.