Autocatalytic Constraint Closure as an Organizational Principle for Machine Consciousness
Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series May 18, 2026 Armando Vieira, Liane Gabora
Current AI systems are largely organized around prediction-error minimization and reward optimization. While these frameworks have been highly successful, they do not address how AI systems can develop the kind of integrated, self-maintaining world-model widely regarded as central to consciousness. This paper proposes autocatalytic constraint closure as a necessary organizational principle for...