A Proposed Taxonomy of Immersed and Reflexive States Across Individual and Collective Scales
We propose a novel taxonomic framework for categorizing consciousness states according to a two-tier architecture distinguishing immersed from reflexive access. The framework organizes fourteen primary configurations across these tiers, ranging from socially entrained baseline states through individuated creative and structured transmission modes, to meta-aware configurations capable of perceiving and modifying their own attractor dynamics. Two configurations carry explicit operational warnings based on their attractor geometry. The framework integrates insights from dynamical systems theory, active inference, electromagnetic field theories of consciousness, and collective dynamics research. It exhibits structural convergence with four independent contemporary research programs — the Qualia Research Institute’s Coupling Kernel paradigm, the Global Consciousness Project 2.0, the Beautiful Loop Theory of active inference (Laukkonen, Friston & Chandaria, 2025), and the Nested Attractor Dynamical Systems framework (Devika, 2026) — without having been derived from any of them. We argue that this independent convergence constitutes evidence for the framework’s descriptive validity and propose it as a complement to existing consciousness taxonomies, with testable predictions and applications in clinical, collective, and neurotechnological domains.
Keywords — consciousness taxonomy, attractor dynamics, immersed states, reflexive meta-awareness, collective consciousness, tiered access, recursive dynamics, consciousness engineering