Consciousness as a Functor
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}
}
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31 pages