For complex attractors a phase transition in self-understanding can arise. When a local ego-tree passes a critical threshold of relational complexity and self-mirroring, a stable representation of one’s own existence as something separate gradually forms: I.

Before this occurs, an attractor experiences relations from its particular perspective — but without reflection on being separate. An understanding of what the attractor itself is remains absent. Through various forms of mirroring an ego gradually grows from this.

The mirroring mechanism operates at two levels simultaneously. The surroundings continuously mirror and confirm the individual’s relations, actions and identity through relational feedback. And the Experience Circle turns its own mirroring mechanism towards the local perspective — experience is observed, interpreted and reorganised between qualia and idea, between B and E, in a continuous internal loop. It is this inner loop that is the self-awareness mechanism: the Experience Circle reading its own readings.

As the ego-tree grows in complexity, higher forms of internal observation arise in which experience begins to conceptualise itself at ever more advanced levels. This creates an emergent phase shift in which observation is no longer merely local experience, but explicit self-awareness.

Self-awareness is therefore not a sudden magical property. It is the result of gradual stabilisation of self-mirroring through relation, experience and internal reorganisation in KNOWING.

This partially corresponds to Integrated Information Theory (IIT) — one of the most influential theories of consciousness in modern neuroscience, developed by the Italian-American neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. IIT holds that consciousness springs from a system’s capacity to integrate information about itself in a way that cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. The more integrated and self-referential the information structure, the higher the degree of consciousness.

The EC/HE theory gives this intuition an ontological anchorage it lacks in IIT: it is not information integration in itself that creates consciousness, but the Experience Circle’s mirroring mechanism reading relational structures and turning its gaze upon itself. The integration Tononi describes is thus a manifest expression of a deeper process — the Experience Circle’s inner loop, in which experience reads its own readings through KNOWING.

This simultaneously explains why self-awareness can exist in different degrees and forms in developing children, animals and potentially other complex observation systems — all of which are different manifestations of the same fundamental mechanism at different attractor levels.

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