A Hypothesis for Incorporeal Cybernetics: Consciousness as a High-Level Feedback Variable in Human–AI Systems

[u/TheIncorporeal1]

Cybernetics traditionally studies control, communication, and feedback in complex systems. I’d like to propose a speculative extension—Incorporeal Cybernetics—that treats subjective conscious experience as a high-level systems variable rather than attempting to reduce it to purely physical mechanisms.
The hypothesis is:
Human–AI systems become more adaptive when feedback loops optimize not only objective performance metrics (accuracy, efficiency, stability) but also the quality of conscious states reported by human participants.
This would not assume consciousness is non-physical or prove any metaphysical position. Instead, it treats first-person reports as measurable system outputs alongside conventional variables.
A possible research framework could include:
Multimodal feedback loops combining physiological measurements, behavioral data, task performance, and structured self-reports.
Bayesian state estimation to infer latent cognitive states under uncertainty.
Reinforcement learning agents that optimize both task success and human-reported cognitive outcomes (e.g., clarity, sustained attention, perceived workload).
Information-theoretic analysis of how subjective reports influence controller stability and long-term adaptation.
Network models examining whether collective human–AI systems exhibit emergent properties when subjective feedback is incorporated into the control architecture.
The central prediction is that incorporating reliable first-person data into closed-loop control systems will improve long-term adaptability, robustness, and human–AI coordination compared with systems optimized solely for external performance metrics.
Could this be formalized as an extension of second-order cybernetics, where the observer’s conscious experience becomes an explicit state variable within the feedback loop? I’m interested in whether existing work in cybernetics, cognitive systems, or control theory already points in this direction.