Consciousness

Consciousness is the integral part of an entity that grants it awareness of its surroundings, autonomy and a certain amount of access to free will. It is not discrete, but is rather a continuous spectrum, along which both biological and non-biological life may be placed in terms of degrees of sapience. Physical form is not a requisite for the existence of consciousness, and the great majority of conscious entities are non-physical or semi-physical, such as ThoughtForms.

Like all existent things, consciousnesses metaphysically interact with the reality around them, exerting a certain amount of permanence based on the internal machinations of said consciousness via a morphic field. The strength and direction of this reality-bending effect is greatly affected by the local consensus reality, the level of focus on certain intent and may be enhanced my more physical factors that enhance reality-bending capabilities, such as the concentration of AR-type structures within or close to the body. A consciousness existing in a more metaphysically-oriented consensus reality tends towards being shaped by that consensus reality, which in turn affects the morphic generated by the consciousness itself; this can result in a chain reaction in which over time, a significant enough change to local consensus reality influences the surrounding consensus and eventually causes a paradigm shift within the constitutional consensus reality. Such an interaction is described in Dott's Consensus Cascade Theory; through this mechanism the consensus realities of sentient beings are imprinted on dark matter local to their habitats.

Sapience
While sentience is simply the constitutional property of all consciousnesses, sapience varies greatly between different sentient entities. Sapience is the measure of ability of an entity to think and act practically using knowledge and experience, and by extension leads to a greater ability to focus intent for the use of reality-bending abilities. Typically, paraphysical reality bending requires a greater degree of sapience to propagate than the exophysical variety. While there is no discrete distinction between the finer levels of sapience, it is known that certain types of reality bending have mechanisms that only function with a certain level of sapience, such as the Waltzmann morphic field. As a result, lower-sapience entities such as artificial intelligences (with one notable exception) are incapable of triggering the Waltzmann pathway due to their inability to interact with the Waltzmann field and direct the energy conversion.

The determining factor and origins of sapience has been theorised to be anomalous.