Functional systems of consciousness: how we make decisions and how to diagnose them

Introduction

This book grew from a simple but important intuition: it is not sufficient to describe a person only through symptoms, personality traits, emotions, or isolated cognitive processes. A person lives through decisions — through modes of action, through the transitions between intention, orientation, choice, execution, correction, and learning from outcomes.

That is why the central focus of this book is neither "the psyche in general" nor "the brain in isolation," but rather functional systems of consciousness — integrated, living configurations in which a person, explicitly or implicitly, organizes themselves toward achieving a specific result. The subject is how a decision assembles itself: how it is sustained, how it breaks down, how it is displaced by automaticity, and how it can be restored to more conscious control.

In a broader sense, the language of functional systems can be applied to many other objects. When we stress-test the cardiovascular system on a treadmill, or assess pulmonary ventilation under physical load, we are in effect evaluating how a system achieves its result under demand — whether it adapts or fails. When a selection committee screens candidates for a special operations unit or an analytical post, it is assessing integrated functional configurations: endurance, attention, stress tolerance, decision-making quality. When a robot executes a complex flip and lands upright, or transfers a fragile egg from one container to another without breaking it, functionally organized cycles are at work there too: there is a reference point, an environmental model, actions, and feedback.

In all of these cases, we are already diagnosing functional systems by their outcomes — even when we do not explicitly call it that. But in this book, the focus is deliberately narrowed. We are concerned with a particular class of systems — functional systems of consciousness: those in which there is an inner subject capable of consciously setting reference points, revising internal models, modifying actions, and learning from results. Systems in which diagnosis inevitably involves the person as a participant, not merely as an object of external observation.

At first glance, an objection naturally arises: is it not true that most of human life unfolds unconsciously, automatically, without continuous deliberate control? A person walks, writes, responds, turns away, reaches for their phone, makes micro-decisions — often without any explicit internal narration of each step.

This is precisely why the qualifier "of consciousness" in the book's title requires explanation. In this book, functional systems of consciousness are not systems in which everything is consciously monitored at every moment. They are systems in which consciousness can play a decisive role — in setting the reference point, in revising the mental model of the situation, in selecting and correcting action, and in learning from outcomes. In other words, they are functional systems that either already contain a conscious component, or can be brought to the level of conscious observation and reorganization.

Human life is composed precisely of such hybrids. We often begin something consciously and then reduce it to automaticity; or, conversely, we live for a long time within an automatic pattern until a crisis, a mistake, pain, or a conversation brings that pattern into the light. Consciousness here is not opposed to the unconscious: it is the level at which automated processes can be seen, described, evaluated, and changed.

This distinction is especially important for diagnostics. In the conventional understanding, diagnosis often looks like a description of an already existing state: what is wrong with a person, which category their difficulties belong to, which label or profile to assign. In this book, the concept of diagnostics is broader: it is not only a record of what is, but an intervention through the clarification of decision architecture.

Unlike the diagnosis of organs or technical systems — where external observation and objective indicators are sometimes sufficient — the diagnosis of functional systems of consciousness is necessarily a collaborative undertaking. It involves the person themselves as a participant who sees, understands, and changes their own decisions. When a person, together with a researcher, physician, psychologist, educator, or manager — or alone with themselves — begins to ask: "What is the task here? What is my reference point? What model of myself, others, and the world am I currently using? What am I actually doing? What am I learning from the outcomes?" — the functional system ceases to be entirely automatic. An observer appears within it. The possibility of correction appears. Consciousness begins to participate in its own architecture of decisions.

Accordingly, the diagnosis of functional systems of consciousness is understood in this book in a dual sense. On one hand, it is a way of describing how a person's reference points, internal models, actions, feedback loops, learning cycles, and system competition and cooperation are organized. On the other hand, it is a way of temporarily or durably increasing the proportion of conscious control over what previously operated as a semi-automatic or fully automatic process.

At the same time, this book aims to be honest about the limits of what such diagnostics can encompass. What it describes and can influence is primarily the field of the consciously accessible: reference points, internal models, actions, and learning processes that a person is capable of observing, verbalizing, and gradually changing. The underlying biological pathogenetic mechanisms of many conditions — immune, neuroendocrine, autonomic, metabolic — are not directly accessible through conscious observation alone. They can be influenced indirectly: through environment, embodied practice, time, behavioral change, and — as emotional-stress arterial hypertension and chronic musculoskeletal pain in the Anokhin school illustrate — through identifying and addressing the chronified functional system that sustains them. This boundary does not diminish the value of the approach — it is its precise epistemological map.This boundary does not diminish the value of the approach — it is its precise epistemological map.

An important context for this book lies in what has been missing from Functional Systems Theory itself. The theory brilliantly described the mechanism by which organisms achieve adaptive results — yet it left largely undeveloped the practical tools for diagnosing living systems in a specific person: for seeing, in a real day and a real situation, what specific functional systems are operating, assessing their quality, identifying their failures, and locating the possibilities for change.

This book takes the first steps in a direction that has remained largely open: it proposes using functional systems as an operational language for diagnosing the architecture of decisions. It does not claim the task is complete, but shows what such diagnostics might look like in practice and maps the territory for further work. If this program is developed through research and practice, it has the potential to fundamentally shift how we think about diagnosis: from static labels and symptom checklists toward the analysis of living functional systems of consciousness that organize decisions in real time.

The book is not limited to clinical medicine. The word "diagnostics" is used here in its broad sense: as the identification of a system's architecture, quality, failures, and developmental possibilities in action. This applies to medicine and psychotherapy, psychology and coaching, education, management, competency assessment, professional quality evaluation, institutional decision-making, and even human interaction with digital or hybrid systems.

At the center of the book stand three core nodes through which functional systems of consciousness can be described:

• Reference point — what counts as the result, and by what criterion it is evaluated
• Internal model — how the person sees the world, themselves, others, and possible consequences
• Action / learning — what the person does, and how they change themselves in response to outcomes

Through this triad, one can examine simple everyday micro-decisions and interpersonal relationships, disease-oriented configurations and professional actions, and complex institutional architectures alike. The book does not offer ready-made labels; it offers a language in which decisions can not only be described, but gradually restructured.

The book can be read in different ways. One approach is sequential: from the foundational theory of functional systems to the three core nodes, then to the life domains, and finally to diagnostic procedures and hybrid systems. Another is to enter from practice — from everyday life, relationships, information behavior, somatic symptoms, or uncertainty — and return to the theoretical chapters later, when the need for a deeper structural framework arises.

This book does not provide a completed measurement scale for consciousness, nor does it claim to offer a final standardized protocol. Its aim is different: to open a new conceptual frame in which functional systems can be understood as systems of conscious participation, and in which diagnostics can be understood as a path from automaticity toward greater clarity, agency, and governability of decisions — and, simultaneously, as the beginning of a new direction of work with decision architecture that has yet to be fully developed.

More about this topic can be found in our books on Our Books on Google Play and related articles in the Index.

Mykola Iabluchanskyi together with Andriy Yabluchanskiy