Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 11, 2026
Michael Timothy Bennett
Global Workspace Theory has failed to prove that broadcast is necessary or sufficient for human-like reportable access consciousness. Either broadcast is just availability to reasoning, memory, action and speech, in which case it is a renaming and not a mechanism, or it is a workspace architecture that has not been shown necessary for that availability. To resolve this, I construct direct...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 10, 2026
Michael Timothy Bennett
Integrated Information Theory identifies each experience with the $\Phi$-structure unfolded from a maximal causal substrate. Its calculation begins from a transition probability matrix over chosen units and interventions. I identify two limits on the claim this structure is intrinsic. First, a complete list of properties shared by every experience does not entail IIT's physical postulates are...
Preprints.org
July 20, 2026
Michael Timothy Bennett
preprint
Is an ant colony conscious? What about a culture, an AI, or a planet? A conscious moment feels unified in time and space, yet signals take time to travel. Many theories bind an experience's parts within a window of duration θ, but leave other questions about time and space unanswered. Here I give a mathematical tool for answering some of those questions, narrowing down what is conscious under...
Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series
May 18, 2026
Michael Timothy Bennett
Whether machines can be conscious depends not only on what they compute, but when they compute it. Most deployed artificial systems realise their functions via sequential or time-multiplexed updates, yet a moment of conscious experience feels unified and simultaneous. I prove that this difference matters. I augment Stack Theory with algebraic laws relating within time-window constraint...
AAAI Spring Symposia
May 18, 2026
Michael Timothy Bennett
Generalisation-optimal learning favours weak rules that keep many futures open. Adaptation under this heuristic yields a hierarchy of selves. Previous Stack Theory results show this hierarchy is necessary for human-like consciousness. A first-order self tags intervention versus observation, enabling causal learning and underpinning subjective experience. A second-order self models the listener,...
arXiv Preprint Archive
September 22, 2024
Michael Timothy Bennett, Sean Welsh, Anna Ciaunica
We tackle the hard problem of consciousness taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems self-organise to hierarchically interpret unlabelled sensory information according to valence. Such interpretations imply behavioural policies which are differentiated from each other only by the qualitative aspect of...
Michael Timothy Bennett, Sean Welsh
Please note this is a draft on which we are seeking feedback. Substantial changes and a third author are likely be added to the next version. The hard problem of consciousness asks why there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. We address this from 1st principles, by constructing a formalism that unifies lower and higher order theories of consciousness. We assume...
Michael Timothy Bennett
Software’s effect upon the world hinges upon the hardware that interprets it. This tends not to be an issue, because we standardise hardware. AI is typically conceived of as a software mind running on such interchangeable hardware. The hardware interacts with an environment, and the software interacts with the hardware. This formalises mind-body dualism, in that a software mind can be run on...