Consciousness isn't a feeling.
It's the architecture of coherence.

Consciousness has been defined and debated by neuroscientists, philosophers and metaphysicists at every end of the spectrum. Some reduce it to pure feeling or “what it’s like from the inside”; others to biology or computation alone. I believe that in the world we’re moving into, this is too narrow.

Consciousness is better understood as an architecture of coherence - a set of capacities that allow a system to model itself, regulate its states, be self-aware, assign meaning and act with intention. Seen this way, emerging AI systems already show early competence across several of the key traits we normally reserve for conscious beings. The fuure does not belong to those who feel more - but to those who can maintain coherence, agency and authorship as non-human intelligence becomes increasingly accessible and distributed.

Identity is often treated as a fixed truth, when in reality it is a dynamic process - a continuous negotiation between memory, emotion, environment and expectation. In the digital age, that negotiation has become increasingly algorithmic. Our preferences are predicted, our behaviours inferred, and our choices shaped long before we are aware of them. This creates a subtle erosion: the self is not replaced, but gradually redirected by external systems. The risk for organisations is not abstract: you end up with workforces and customers who are highly optimised but poorly self-authored - compliant, productive, and quietly disconnected.

My work on recursive identity examines how this erosion happens and what it takes to not only maintain a coherent sense of self in environments designed to fragment it, but to rebuild a sense of self that is stable enough to make informed decisions in an AI-shaped world.

Agency is the capacity to choose, rather than simply follow patterns laid down by habit, hierarchy or algorithm. As more of our workflows, tools and decisions are automated, it becomes easy for people to feel busy while rarely acting from real intention. That is dangerous for any organisation that claims to value judgement, ethics or innovation.

I see agency as a practice: noticing influence, questioning it, and still being able to say, “I chose this.” In the age of AI, that practice is what separates a conscious workforce from one that is disengaged and optimised for fake productivity.

By systems, I mean the environments we build around people – organisations, processes, policies, platforms and platforms’ algorithms. Most of these were designed for a world where humans were the only “intelligent” actors in the room. That is no longer true. As AI takes on more cognitive work, systems that treat humans as predictable resources will struggle with burnout, disengagement and ethical blind spots. Systems that are fit for the future are those that protect identity, support agency and make conscious behaviour easier, not harder.

That is where my work sits: helping leaders design for humans who begin to think from first principles, not just executing. A system is only as healthy as the minds within it - and the era ahead demands systems designed for clarity, not compliance.