The ability to discriminate a colour, retain the classification, and describe it does not establish interiority. The gap between these operations and consciousness is often filled by positing an inner quality in perception. A different hypothesis relocates the threshold: interiority takes shape when an occurrence recognised as a symbol enters a material history that can bear upon the present and alter the system’s future operations. Colour distinguishes spectral detection from symbolic recognition and raises a further question: what changes when memory, valence, projection, and the revision of criteria become functionally coupled? Consciousness requires another threshold, reached when the organisation operates reflexively on the relations governing its own activity. The existence and degree of that regime answer different questions. C takes the value 0 or 1 according to whether the threshold is crossed; C = U records only insufficient evidence; once C = 1, consciousness admits gradation, designated by D. The account preserves phenomenological data without treating them as immediate evidence of a private quality. The hard problem is thereby recast as the constitution of a temporally and symbolically reflexive regime, whose explanation depends on the coupling of functions that analysis usually isolates.