Good morning. As I read Jonathan Sadowski's The Empire of Depression I had a thought: Consciousness is commonly labelled as an "emergent property" of the mind. Right? But... What is the function of consciousness? What are the functions of emotions? What are the high-level input-outputs of the systems responsible for 'creating' (outputting) consciousness? And in turn, what other systems is consciousness a part of? Is consciousness the output of a function? The input of a function? A type of information? A type of function? A variable? A constant? A type of data storage mechanism? A protocol for transferring information? A state manager?

(These are all software engineering terms. Terms I work with on a daily basis.)

From a systems perspective, I'm curious to know what biological processes we're referring to when we say "consciousness". And I'm also curious to know what those biological processes actually are. And understand the dependence of these processes with other processes.