Consciousness as Information-Optimizing Participatory Extractor of Reality (CIO-PER): A Unified Information-Theoretic Framework for the Emergence of Observable Reality from a Pre-Spacetime Substrate

This article presents a basic concept for a comprehensive, unified theoretical framework for the mechanism of consciousness by synthesizing four cornerstone advances in quantum foundations and information physics: John Archibald Wheeler’s participatory universe and “It from Bit” paradigm 1, Quantum Bayesianism (QBism) with its participatory realism 2, Melvin Vopson’s Infodynamics (encompassing the mass-energy-information equivalence principle and the second law of infodynamics) 3,4, and Wojciech Zurek’s decoherence theory together with Quantum Darwinism, which accounts for the “loss of quantumness” and the emergence of classical objectivity 5,6. In contrast to objective-collapse models such as Penrose and Hameroff’s Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) 7, we propose that consciousness is not a secondary emergent phenomenon arising from physical processes within an already-objective spacetime but the „primary participatory agent” that actively extracts and renders the classical, observable, and subjectively experienced reality - including particles, mass, energy, frequency, and spacetime geometry itself - from a deeper, pre-spacetime, purely informational substrate we denote as Φ. A mathematically consistent model is constructed in which consciousness functions as an information-optimizing, self-referential agent within Φ. Quantum states are interpreted as an agent’s subjective Bayesian probabilities (QBism); information entropy is dynamically minimized according to the second law of infodynamics; environmental interactions select robust pointer states through redundant copying (Quantum Darwinism); and participatory measurements actualize definite “its” (Wheeler) from underlying “bits.” The Einstein–Planck–de Broglie equivalence E = mc² = hf, which implies that every massive particle possesses an internal “metronome” ticking at the Compton frequency f ≈ mc²/h, appears only as a stabilized, experienced feature „after” this participatory extraction process. The framework preserves all empirical successes of quantum mechanics while naturally accommodating a simulation-like virtuality of macroscopic reality. We derive explicit mathematical relations, testable predictions, a detailed comparison with Orch-OR, followed by an extensive discussion of potential criticisms, and - crucially - a new extension exploring how the same mechanism may enable the emergence of consciousness in advanced artificial intelligence systems, particularly agentic large language models (LLMs). The result is a physically operational, information-theoretic vision of consciousness as the co-creator of the observable cosmos.