In Summary

Consciousness is a loosely coupled binary control system, the two components of which are a World Making System (WMS) and a Behavior Determining System (BDS), with "attention" being the process that loosely couples them ("loose" in the sense that other factors and contexts are also involved in determining the operation of the two systems). The system or "organism" that Consciousness controls receives signals, on a variety of signal channels (i.e., "senses"), from its environment, and transmits those to Consciousness. The WMS component of Consciousness receives those signals, modulates them by mapping them to prefabricated "spectra", one for each channel – giving rise to so-called "qualia" – and relates the different spectra to one another by relating them all to a generated, common "space" centered upon the body of the organism – this is the "world" of a conscious system. The BDS component, under the influence of innate or hard-wired motivations or drives, forms particular goals or "purposes", and these in turn govern "attention", which is a heightened awareness of, or focus on, a part of that generated world as an input to a decision-making process; other inputs are memory, anticipation or imagination, and emotion, and all of this together goes into the determination of action or behavior, on a moment-by-moment basis.