Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 30, 2026
Kimiyasu Igarashi
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...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
August 11, 2026
Kimiyasu Igarashi
Abstract How can universal law yield a consciousness that is private, temporally continuous, and capable of acting back upon the world? This paper proposes a world-coupled path theory. A universal update rule first creates a fragile asymmetry; repeated encounters transform it into a history-bearing path. The world alters that path (feeling), the alteration remains attributable to this...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 20, 2026
Kimiyasu Igarashi
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...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
June 19, 2026
Kimiyasu Igarashi
Why should a world governed by nothing but universal physical law give rise to anything private — anything proper to one system and to no other? Recent neuroscience offers a foothold: the brain keeps its own history as a physical trace, couples it to the present across timescales from seconds to days, and lays down most readily the traces tied to its survival. Taking this as a starting point,...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 31, 2026
Kimiyasu Igarashi
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...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
May 29, 2026
Kimiyasu Igarashi
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...