English

Consciousness as a Functor

Artificial Intelligence 2025-08-26 v1 Machine Learning

Abstract

We propose a novel theory of consciousness as a functor (CF) that receives and transmits contents from unconscious memory into conscious memory. Our CF framework can be seen as a categorial formulation of the Global Workspace Theory proposed by Baars. CF models the ensemble of unconscious processes as a topos category of coalgebras. The internal language of thought in CF is defined as a Multi-modal Universal Mitchell-Benabou Language Embedding (MUMBLE). We model the transmission of information from conscious short-term working memory to long-term unconscious memory using our recently proposed Universal Reinforcement Learning (URL) framework. To model the transmission of information from unconscious long-term memory into resource-constrained short-term memory, we propose a network economic model.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.17561,
  title  = {Consciousness as a Functor},
  author = {Sridhar Mahadevan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.17561},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

31 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:03:48.296Z