AbstractDebates about artificial consciousness and AI welfare ask whether an artificial system can feel, deserve protection, possess private interests, or bear responsibility. Each question contains a prior pronoun: whose experience, welfare, history, action, and future? For organisms, body, developmental history, and practical individual usually travel together, letting the body proxy the...
Why should being alive matter for consciousness? Theories grounded in self-maintenance argue that conscious systems are distinguished by the need to remain viable in a changing world. What this requirement contributes, mechanistically, has remained unclear. A companion paper argued that self-reference alone is sufficient for something private to arise: a system whose present state recursively...
A central unresolved question in computational consciousness research concerns whether meaningful differences between biological and artificial systems can be quantified without recourse to computationally intractable measures such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT). We propose Participation Ratio (PR) — derived from the eigenvalue distribution of neural trajectory covariance matrices — as...
A central unresolved question in computational consciousness research concerns whether meaningful differences between biological and artificial systems can be quantified without recourse to computationally intractable measures such as Integrated Information Theory (IIT). We propose Participation Ratio (PR) — derived from the eigenvalue distribution of neural trajectory covariance matrices — as...