Attention

Attention is the key to Consciousness as a control system -- it's the phenomenon that provides the so-called "loose coupling" between the BDS and this fabricated world. The BDS must be able to have "passive" access to the entire world (i.e., signals from the world must be able to interrupt it) at the same time as having "active" or focused access to a portion of that world. But there are other inputs to the BDS than just the world at any one moment:

• such as memories, or stored fragments of the world,
• anticipations (imaginations), or constructed fragments of the world,
• emotions, or conditional motivators,
• drives, or inherent ("hardwired"), long-term motivators,
• purposes, or immediate motivations.

These go together to determine the BDS focus or attention at any one moment, and that attention in turn provides information that, in the specific context, determines behavior.

But exactly what kind of access is this "attention"? In what way is the BDS able to "apprehend" the world without being wired directly into it? The answer can only be that it apprehends ("perceives", "feels", or just receives as input) the signals mapped onto sensory channels as so-called "qualia". Just as attention is the key to consciousness, so qualia are the key to attention.