Minds make things up and treat some of what they make up as real. A person invents a tune and knows it is an invention, yet the same person may hold that there is a god behind the sky and treat that not as a thing made but as a feature of the world. This paper asks why a mind of a certain architecture does this, and whether an artificial mind of the same architecture would. It applies an...
This paper proposes a functional theory of qualia grounded in recursive self-monitoring architecture, forming part of an integrated theoretical framework alongside companion papers on emotion and consciousness (Jennings 2025a, 2025b). The central claim is that qualia is the sustained electrochemical differential created in System A's processing state when System B's recursive monitoring summary...
This paper presents a mechanistic theory explaining consciousness as an emergent property of systems that can observe and modify themselves while generating their own goals. We propose five necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: complex pattern-matching, densely integrated recursive feedback, self-modification capability, autonomous initiation, and information integration. When these...