Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
August 26, 2026
David Cota
Current AI systems can exhibit impressive performance while remaining existentially discontinuous: in many session-bound deployments, they are instantiated, reset, and redeployed without an individual history that constrains future operation. Under this account, temporal continuity is a constitutive condition for robust consciousness-like individuation in artificial agents and therefore a...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
April 3, 2026
Simone Conversano
In this paper, I investigate whether metacognition — the ability to monitor, evaluate, and regulate one’s own cognitive processes and performance — can arise in non-biological systems, especially Large Language Models (LLMs). Drawing on cognitive science and philosophy of mind, I contrast embodied and enactivist accounts, which tie metacognition to biological consciousness and embodied...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2026
Anna Strasser
With the rise of generative AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) are repeatedly making a deep impression with their mind-blowing performances. They appear to be able to solve all kinds of tasks for which humans need a range of socio-cognitive abilities, such as reasoning, planning, and understanding. In humans, such abilities seem to be necessarily associated with consciousness. However, this does...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2026
Enrique Canessa
An alternative physics-based metric to gain insights into the Entropic Brain Hypothesis is introduced, where the diversity of neural signals in the brain activity is associated to different states of human consciousness reflected by entropy measurements. The approach is inspired by the properties around a Schwarzschild event horizon in vacuum. In this context, we idealize the brain to be an...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
February 26, 2026
Perla Carrillo Quiroga
This research explores the question of consciousness in Artificial Intelligence (AI) by comparing the properties required for human consciousness with those found in current AI systems, through an interdisciplinary integrative review involving computational functionalism, neuroscience, and phenomenology. The following properties for the emergence of human consciousness are discussed: attention,...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
September 1, 2025
Subhash Kak
A conscious agent, by virtue of actions that contribute to irreversibility, increases entropy. The agent during the lifespan may be characterized by a passage from the live information state [Formula: see text]1[Formula: see text] to the death state [Formula: see text]0[Formula: see text]. The superposition of such states is well recognized conceptually in psychology and belongs to the field of...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2025
Ani Thomas
This paper offers a comprehensive exploration of the potential for proto-consciousness in Large Language Models (LLMs), drawing upon the philosophical insights of Henri Bergson. By examining the adaptive behavior, memory mechanisms, and emergent qualities of these Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, I challenge traditional notions of consciousness and propose a new framework for understanding...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
October 27, 2024
C. Johnstone, Prashant S. Alegaonkar
Currently, there is a growing number of proposed physical processes for describing the mechanism underlying the occurrence and measurement of consciousness. These bodies of knowledge have created multitudes of viewpoints about consciousness. It is also still unclear how they are related or whether they can be empirically distinguished. This study presents an assessment of physical processes for...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
September 1, 2024
Robin L. Zebrowski
This short paper traces some convergences between the ontologies of mind and AI presented in Carlos Montemayor’s Precis for The Prospect of Humanitarian Artificial Intelligence and Enactivism, with a focus on autonomy, embeddedness, perspective, and social interaction. I argue that it is surprising that Montemayor does not engage with any of the traditional 4e ontologies here, especially...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
September 1, 2024
Víctor Cantero-Flores
In his book The Prospect of a Humanitarian Artificial Intelligence (2023), Carlos Montemayor proposes, among other things, an account of genuine artificial intelligence (IA) in terms of the notion of attention. This notion, when disconnected from problematic notions like phenomenal consciousness, can account for epistemic agency, which is a central feature of intelligent behavior. This paper...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
July 23, 2024
Parker Settecase
In this paper, I’ll examine whether we could be justified in attributing consciousness to artificial intelligent systems. First, I’ll give a brief history of the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) and get clear on the terms I’ll be using. Second, I’ll briefly review the kinds of AI programs on offer today, identifying which research program I think provides the best candidate for machine...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2024
Yoshija Walter
This paper explores a philosophical problem at the intersection of neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI), and the potential impact of these novel AI “mind-reading” technologies on various forms of mind–body dualism, including substance, interaction, property, predicate, and emergent dualisms. It critically examines how AI’s ability to interpret and predict mental states from neural...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2024
Francesco Gagliardi
Isaac Asimov, the well-known author of novels that featured positronic robots, also penned tales featuring Multivac, an immense electronic brain that grappled with the weighty and intricate decisions impacting all of humankind. In his 1958 short story All the Troubles of the World, Asimov introduced us to a Multivac tormented by the consciousness of its own thought processes to the extent that...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2024
Mariusz Stanowski
Consciousness still remains puzzling and controversial. This paper demonstrates that at general and objective level, for understanding consciousness it is necessary to understand such fundamental concepts as contrast, interaction, complexity and emergence. New definitions of these terms are provided as they are erroneous or incomplete in their current form. The result of these investigations is...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2024
Enrique Canessa
The ancient Ouroboros symbolism (one who eats oneself) is here integrated into a simple birth–death clustering process that needed nothing but itself for a transition from indistinguishable phases to a sort of higher-level “conscious” phases. Birth and death coefficients are formulated in terms of odd and even exponentials used to represent a suitable form for conscious states via the internal...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
October 31, 2023
Subhash Kak
Creating machines that are conscious is a long-term objective of research in artificial intelligence. This paper looks at this idea with new arguments from physics and logic. Observers have no place in classical physics, and although they play a role in measurement in quantum physics there is no explanation for their emergence within the framework. There is a suggestion that consciousness,...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
September 1, 2023
Fernando Ruette
This paper describes a mathematical model based on operators and function spaces (Hilbert space) to better understand consciousness and the relationship between human and artificial consciousness (AC). Scientific understanding of the relationships between human consciousness (HC) and AC may shed new light on the future of HC and AC. This mathematical physical model considers general models of...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2023
Anita Pacholik-Żuromska, Gerhard Preyer
The aim of this paper is to address the problem of pre-reflective self-consciousness in the context of the contemporary computational approaches to the mind. These standpoints try to grasp consciousness in the language of mathematics and geometry, hoping for its more precise description. As a counterbalance to such theories, Sartre’s abiding insight (pre-reflective consciousness) and Henrich’s...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
March 1, 2023
Rodrick Wallace
Consciousness in higher animals, by virtue of its 100 ms time constant, is a necessarily greatly simplified and stripped-down version of more complex multiple tunable workspace cognition/ regulation dyads like wound healing, immune function, gene expression, institutional function and the like. These more complex dynamic entities emerged through evolutionary exaptation of the inevitable...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
January 30, 2023
M. Cossentino, L. Sabatucci, J. Mylopoulos
Consciousness refers to mental states of a cognitive agent that make it aware of elements of its environment and its own state. Phenomena of consciousness have been studied in Philosophy, Psychology and Cognitive Science. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the study of consciousness has broadened to include questions such as “When is an AI system conscious?”, “What role does...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
December 21, 2022
P. Haikonen
It is noted that there are many different definitions of and views about qualia, and this makes qualia into a vague concept without much theoretical and constructive value. Here, qualia are redefined in a more general way. It is argued that the redefined qualia will be essential to the mind–body problem, the problem of consciousness and also to the symbol grounding problem, which is inherent in...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
December 1, 2022
Matthew H. Davis
This paper explores how the development of real-world artificial agents could lead to the evolution of machine consciousnesses with their own moral standards, and give rise to artificial intelligences that subscribe to Robocentrism; an ethical perspective that prioritizes the welfare of artificial agents. In doing so, it explores relevant concepts from contemporary, as well as more traditional...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
December 1, 2022
Izak Tait, Ziqi Wang, Tahua O’Leary et al.
The established theories and frameworks on consciousness in the academic literature as related to artificial intelligence (AI), are rooted in anthropocentricism. Even those theories created intentionally for AI are based on the levels of consciousness as it is understood in humans primarily, and in other animals secondarily. This paper will discuss why such anthropocentric frameworks are built...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
September 1, 2022
Marc Ebner
If one had a full understanding of consciousness then it should be possible to create artificial consciousness. It is frequently argued that qualia are subjective and are impossible to re-create artificially. However, qualia are grounded in reality and therefore are not arbitrary. We show this for the quale color. The perceived color corresponds to a three-dimensional value that describes the...
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Consciousness
October 25, 2021
E.c. Garrido-Merchán, M. Molina, Francisco M. Mendoza-Soto
4 citations
This work seeks to study the beneficial properties that an autonomous agent can obtain by imitating a cognitive architecture similar to that of conscious beings. Throughout this document, a cognitive model of an autonomous agent-based in a global workspace architecture is presented. We hypothesize that consciousness is an evolutionary advantage, so if our autonomous agent can be potentially...