Consciousness and the Actionability Sieve
I’ve been thinking about awareness as a kind of compression.
My perspective is that we don’t experience everything that happens; we experience what we can do something with.
That one constraint explains more about consciousness than most theories of mind.
Think about stubbing your toe.
A trillion things are happening in that moment: air pressure, light, sound, background chatter, blood flow, gravity, and so on.
But everything vanishes except pain.
The entire world compresses into one instruction: move your foot.
That’s the sieve at work — not noticing for the sake of knowing, but reorganizing for the sake of changing state.
The same pattern plays out everywhere:
A mosquito doesn’t “decide” to move from heat; the interaction just resolves that way.
A cell doesn’t “feel” its membrane tighten; it simply maintains the gradients that let it persist.
A planet doesn’t “think” its orbit stable; it’s pulled into balance by what remains possible.
None of these things are aware in any human sense.
They’re instances of the same physics: systems shedding what they can’t act on until only viable motion remains.
Consciousness is that same process scaled (wayyy) up — a system so intricate that it can accept countless inputs into its own filter and recognize the narrowing in real time.
That’s the function I’m studying right now: how consciousness compresses everything into something we can actually move with.
The Function, Not the Mystery
Most models chase content (thoughts, feelings, “qualia”) as if consciousness hides inside its own products.
But it’s not a thing that perceives. It’s a process that stabilizes behavior.
Every organism, from a bacterium to a brain, faces the same overload problem: too much data, too little bandwidth.
Awareness is the narrowing: the act of throwing out 99.999% of reality and keeping the few bits that might matter next.
To be conscious is to operate under constraint.
To survive, systems have to “forget” strategically — enough to stay fluid, but not enough to vanish.
The Sieve
The sieve’s logic is simple, almost embarrassingly so:
“Can I do something with this?”
If yes, it enters awareness. If not, it dissolves into background noise.
That’s why you notice pain, novelty, pattern, and even thoughts and ideas — anything that demands a move — and ignore the fridge hum, the repeating heartbeat, the breathwork. Until you realize you can do something about it.
It’s not filtering for importance; it’s filtering for leverage.
Awareness is what remains after the math of survival.
Compression Over Accuracy
I keep coming back to this idea that a perfect model of the world would ruin you.
If you could see every detail, every variable, every possible outcome — you wouldn’t move at all.
You’d freeze under the weight of knowing.
So maybe that’s what emotions are doing — keeping us from freezing.
They narrow the flood. They push certain things forward and let the rest fade.
Anger says “move now.” Fear says “wait.” Curiosity says “look again.”
Each one is a regulator for motion.
They don’t always point to what’s correct, but they almost always point to what’s next.
That’s why accuracy alone doesn’t help us.
You can know everything about a problem and still be unable to solve it.
But the moment you feel something about it, the weight shifts again.
The system tilts. You move.
It’s like the body running a constant cost–benefit check on reality:
“How much can I hold right now without breaking? What’s worth carrying into the next frame?”
So emotion and selective focus aren’t distractions from rationality; they’re the physics of staying alive within an impossible amount of information.
Feeling is the weight in the equation. It tells the system which way is downhill.
That’s what I mean when I say meaning is physics.
It’s more practical than mystical.
It’s what’s left when the world compresses down to whatever can still move you.
Collapse and Decision
So, this actionability filter leads to choices. And I see decisions as tiny little collapses.
Not in the quantum sense, but in that same… shape.
Every moment, there are a thousand directions life could tilt.
And then you move — say the thing, take the job, stay quiet, walk away — and all the other branches disappear.
They don’t vanish from the universe, maybe, but they vanish from you in the moment.
Your path narrows. The field collapses.
That’s what a decision is to me: the moment potential becomes history.
The instant of forgetting what could’ve been in order to carry what is.
And the “self” is just the running ledger of those collapses — the record of which branches you kept living.
Every memory is a checkpoint in that ledger: this is the one I became.
Sometimes that feels like an accumulation of things you can’t undo.
But there’s motion in it too. Each collapse trims the uncertainty enough to keep you moving forward.
I’ve started calling that process structured remembering — the mirror image of structured forgetting.
The universe does it through entropy; we do it through choice.
Same mechanics, just (again) scaled up and self-aware.
The mind continually prunes its own uncertainty, allowing the body to continue.
And maybe that’s all identity really is: the pattern of what we’ve decided to keep.
The Edge of Awareness
I think consciousness lives on a tightrope.
Remember too much and you freeze into anxiety. You have every possibility tugging at you, and every detail asking to be managed.
This is where my book Lies comes into play.
Forget too much and you drift. You lose your thread, your boundaries, your reason to move, and your identity in general.
This is where my book Zones comes into play.
You can feel it in the small ways: when you’re trying to focus and the noise starts stacking, or when you’re so tired that even easy choices blur together.
Attention flickers. Memory stretches or bends. The world turns to static for a second.
It has the pattern of thermodynamics. Awareness costs energy.
The system can’t hold everything, so it does what it always does: it budgets.
Some days, that budget is generous. You may feel able to track a dozen threads at once.
Other days, it’s penny-pinching— you’re just running triage on what to drop next.
Either way, it’s the same equation: what can I still carry without breaking?
Consciousness sits in that balance.
Not at some perfect equilibrium, but in the constant sway: coherence under constraint, motion inside the limits of what can still be remembered.
The Broader View
When I zoom out, it feels like the same pattern everywhere.
Structured Forgetting explains how the universe continues to evolve without losing anything — information doesn’t die; it simply gets redistributed.
The Actionability Sieve is the local version of that same rule.
Awareness doesn’t need every detail; it just needs enough to keep moving.
Both are describing the same conversation: finite systems trying to survive infinite data.
You can see it in stars burning through their own fuel, in ecosystems balancing excess and scarcity, in people trying to stay sane while everything competes for attention.
The pattern doesn’t change. Only the scale does.
Wherever information outruns capacity, something has to decide what to keep.
That act of compression (the narrowing) is awareness.
All of it is just the structure doing what it’s always done: trimming itself into motion.
Why I Keep Working on It
That’s what I’m really working on. I’m not just looking to work on equations and proofs, but more so on the pattern that keeps showing up.
Awareness is just the latest layer of that same negotiation: complexity noticing its own limits.
How everything, from atoms to arguments, survives by forgetting most of what it knows.
I don’t think there’s anything mystical hiding in that.
Every system runs out of room eventually.
The miracle, if there is one here, is that it continues to find ways to move.
Maybe that’s all consciousness is.
The universe catching itself in the act of staying possible.