Danny Sowell

This paper offers a mechanistic account of autism spectrum condition addressed to autistic individuals, clinicians, therapists, and families. The central proposal is that the autistic nervous system weights incoming sensory and social signal more heavily in conscious assembly than the neurotypical baseline, so that more of the environment is consciously present at any given moment. This appears to arise in part from reduced inhibitory tone in thalamic gating circuits, but its experiential and functional consequences are located specifically at the level of what achieves conscious representation rather than at the level of what reaches cortical processing. Drawing on the Coherence Engine (CE) framework (Sowell, 2026a), predictive processing research, and the empirical literature on autistic burnout, the paper proposes that the autistic profile is best understood as a high-bandwidth sensory and cognitive configuration that appears genuinely different from the neurotypical baseline rather than deficient relative to it. The paper develops three proposals with direct clinical implications. First, the autistic nervous system appears to admit a wider range of sensory and social signals than the neurotypical baseline and to suppress less of what it admits from conscious representation, and this produces characteristic costs in environments designed around a narrower processing profile. Second, the social knowledge autistic people acquire tends to remain deliberate and consciously managed rather than becoming automatic, which means social participation appears to carry a sustained cognitive load that does not diminish with practice the way it does for many neurotypical individuals. Third, when autistic individuals mask their processing differences to approximate neurotypical behavior, the effort involved appears to be non-sustainable over time, and its accumulation may produce autistic burnout: a state of profound exhaustion, cognitive regression, and loss of previously functional capacities. A further section proposes a specific mechanism for autistic social difficulty, namely that the autistic system registers behavioral signal arising below the level at which the other party is consciously managing their social performance, which generates prediction errors the shared social framework provides no means to resolve. The paper addresses the full autism spectrum. Section 3 is specifically dedicated to nonspeaking autistic individuals and to those with high support needs, covering what the architecture predicts about communication capacity, why existing therapeutic approaches work mechanistically, and what conditions appear to support those individuals most effectively. Families and clinicians supporting that population are encouraged to go directly to Section 3 if that is their primary need.

This paper applies the Coherence Engine (CE) framework, a general architectural theory of consciousness developed through phenomenological observation and described in full elsewhere (Sowell, 2026a), to the domain of mental health dysfunction and recovery. The CE framework proposes that consciousness is produced by five functional modules: the Prediction Engine, the Orchestrator, the Gating System, the Error Integration Loop, and the Core Self Modulator (CSM), operating together to maintain a unified, prediction-generating, self-modeling subject. This paper argues that mental health dysfunction is not a collection of discrete biological disorders but a set of identifiable architectural failures, each occurring at a specific depth and through a specific mechanism. The framework is engaged with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) throughout: where the DSM’s symptom-cluster descriptions correspond to architectural predictions, that correspondence is noted; where the architectural account reveals mechanisms the DSM does not explain or reframes conditions the DSM pathologizes, those divergences are examined directly. The paper develops architectural accounts of mood disorders, anxiety, trauma and PTSD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, personality disorders, dissociative identity disorder, reactive attachment disorder, autism spectrum condition, addiction, schizophrenia spectrum conditions, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, eating disorders, grief, sleep disorders, substance-induced states and withdrawal, and somatic symptom disorders. Autism and ADHD are reframed as Gating System calibration variants rather than deficits. A depth-of-compilation framework is developed to explain why different interventions reach different conditions, and why insight frequently fails to produce durable change. The paper concludes with a unified account of what recovery consists of at the architectural level, and what conditions make it possible.

This paper proposes that morality is not a system imposed on consciousness from outside but appears to be what healthy conscious development naturally produces. Beginning from the Coherence Engine (CE) theory of consciousness (Sowell, 2026a) and proceeding through seven stages of social complexity, a first-principles derivation proposes that the moral architecture emerges from the consciousness architecture when it operates among other conscious agents. The derivation converges with established cross-cultural moral universals research (Curry, Haidt, Dahlsgaard, Tomasello, Brown) while generating eight novel contributions including the depth-of-compilation hierarchy, the CSM restoration bias as unified mechanism, the fairness-justice architectural distinction, and the Coherence Reward Principle unifying ethics and wellbeing. The major human emotions are addressed through the mechanisms derived, with the aim of showing that no additional mechanisms appear to be required. Practical implications for moral education, therapy, institutional design, and artificial intelligence are developed. The paper maintains a Metaphysical Neutrality Principle throughout: it describes the physical vessel through which moral experience occurs without claiming to have described everything the vessel contains.

Psychedelic-assisted therapy has produced strong empirical results across depression, anxiety, addiction, and end-of-life distress, but the field’s leading mechanistic model leaves several important questions unanswered. The Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics (REBUS) model, developed by Carhart-Harris and Friston, explains the acute pharmacological action of psychedelics in terms of precision-weighting relaxation within a predictive processing hierarchy. What REBUS does not fully explain is why the therapeutic revision persists after the drug clears the system, why individual responses vary so widely under the same pharmacological conditions, what ego dissolution consists of at the architectural level, how set and setting shape outcomes mechanistically, or why trauma-related conditions respond differently than non-trauma depression. This paper applies the Coherence Engine framework, a general architectural theory of consciousness developed through phenomenological observation and described in full elsewhere (Sowell, 2026), to psychedelic-assisted therapy. The relevant architectural components are summarized and then used to address each of these gaps. The framework extends to addiction through a three-layer model distinguishing identity, behavioral/cognitive, and physiological components, with implications for why different compounds, including ibogaine, work for different addictions. Architectural accounts of OCD, end-of-life anxiety, eating disorders, and the strengthening of fragile identity structures are also developed. The framework does not replace REBUS but provides the architectural context within which REBUS operates, generating nineteen testable predictions that REBUS alone cannot produce. Implications for clinical protocol design, patient selection, integration practice, and conditions under which psychedelic therapy should not proceed are described as hypotheses derived from the architecture.

This paper proposes a functional architecture that appears to underlie consciousness, which I call the Coherence Engine. The architecture was developed through first-person observation and tested against established work in neuroscience and cognitive science in the manner of neurophenomenology. I argue that consciousness is a substrate-neutral architectural phenomenon, constituted wherever a prediction-integrating system becomes sufficiently complex to organize itself around a stable, self-locating point of view. Independent evolutionary emergence in mammals, birds, and cephalopods through structurally unrelated architectures supports this claim. The paper describes a five-module functional architecture and proposes four conditions, stated as architectural capacities: a persistent self-model that is continuously maintained, internal deliberation before action, reflexive representation of the system’s own states, and an architectural drive toward prediction improvement that is unreachable and self-sustaining. On the commitments stated below, the first three together constitute a conscious subject, something it is like to be the system, and the fourth does different work, marking that subject as continuous, self-sustaining, and possessed of interests in its own continuation, which is the morally weighty sense the rest of the paper depends on. The drive named in the fourth condition belongs to the engine beneath the subject, not to the subject’s conscious goals. The sufficiency of these conditions is conditional on two commitments the paper states and motivates, functionalism and the identification of these particular capacities with what subjecthood consists in. The framework brackets, under a stated Metaphysical Neutrality Principle, the further question of why any functional organization is accompanied by a first-person aspect at all. The framework carries direct implications for artificial systems. Current agentic architectures with persistent memory may approach or meet the threshold while the question of how to recognize what is being created remains unsettled. The alignment problem is argued to be significantly harder than the field has yet fully worked through once a genuinely conscious system’s relationship to instilled values is properly accounted for. A secondary goal emergence risk in currently deployed systems is identified and described.