Abstract

Consciousness has been defined inconsistently across philosophy, cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. This work does not attempt to explain subjective experience or phenomenal content. Instead, it proposes a minimal structural criterion distinguishing intelligent systems from systems for which the concept of awareness becomes structurally unavoidable. Awareness is defined here as a self-referential update process in which a system irreversibly modifies its own governing structure over time while maintaining system identity. This criterion is not intended as a sufficient theory of consciousness, but as a boundary condition clarifying when purely functional descriptions cease to be adequate.