  The problem of consciousness faced several challenges for a few reasons: (a)
a lack of necessary and sufficient conditions, without which we would not know
how close we are to the solution, (b) a lack of a synthesis framework to build
conscious systems and (c) a lack of mechanisms explaining the transition
between the lower-level chemical dynamics and the higher-level abstractions. In
this paper, I address these issues using a new framework. The central result is
that a person is 'minimally' conscious if and only if he knows at least one
truth. This lets us move away from the vagueness surrounding consciousness and
instead focus equivalently on: (i) what truths are and how our brain
represents/relates them to each other and (ii) how we attain a feeling of
knowing for a truth. For the former problem, since truths are things that do
not change, I replace the abstract notion with a dynamical one called fixed
sets. These sets are guaranteed to exist for our brain and other stable
parallel looped systems. The relationships between everyday events are now
built using relationships between fixed sets, until our brain creates a unique
dynamical state called the self-sustaining threshold 'membrane' of fixed sets.
For the latter problem, I present necessary and sufficient conditions for
attaining a feeling of knowing using a definition of continuity applied to
abstractions. Combining these results, I now say that a person is minimally
conscious if and only if his brain has a self-sustaining dynamical membrane
with abstract continuous paths. A synthetic system built to satisfy this
equivalent self-sustaining membrane condition appears indistinguishable from
human consciousness.
