Related papers: Consciousness is Pattern Recognition
This paper presents a formal proof and empirical validation of functional consciousness in large language models (LLMs) using the Recursive Convergence Under Epistemic Tension (RCUET) Theorem. RCUET defines consciousness as the…
This paper presents a hypothesis that consciousness is a natural result of neurons that become connected recursively, and work synchronously between short and long term memories. Such neurons demonstrate qubit-like properties, each…
By late 20th century, the rationality wars had launched debates about the nature and norms of intuitive and reflective thinking. Those debates drew from mid-20th century ideas such as bounded rationality, which challenged more idealized…
Introspection is a foundational cognitive ability, but its mechanism is not well understood. Recent work has shown that AI models can introspect. We study the mechanism of this introspection. We first extensively replicate Lindsey (2025)'s…
We approach the question "What is Consciousness?" in a new way, not as Descartes' "systematic doubt", but as how organisms find their way in their world. Finding one's way involves finding possible uses of features of the world that might…
Could an AI have conscious experiences? Any answer to this question should conform to Evidentialism - that is, it should be based not on intuition, dogma or speculation but on solid scientific evidence. I argue that such evidence is hard to…
As AI systems increasingly exhibit autonomous, goal-directed, and long-horizon behavior, users lack a standardized way to detect the degree to which a system functions like an intentional actor for governance and accountability purposes.…
Are intelligent machines really intelligent? Is the underlying philosophical concept of intelligence satisfactory for describing how the present systems work? Is understanding a necessary and sufficient condition for intelligence? If a…
We demonstrate that if consciousness is relevant for the temporal evolution of a system's states--that is, if it is dynamically relevant--then AI systems cannot be conscious. That is because AI systems run on CPUs, GPUs, TPUs or other…
Compositionality is believed to be fundamental to intelligence. In humans, it underlies the structure of thought, language, and higher-level reasoning. In AI, compositional representations can enable a powerful form of out-of-distribution…
The accuracies for many pattern recognition tasks have increased rapidly year by year, achieving or even outperforming human performance. From the perspective of accuracy, pattern recognition seems to be a nearly-solved problem. However,…
High-level reasoning can be defined as the capability to generalize over knowledge acquired via experience, and to exhibit robust behavior in novel situations. Such form of reasoning is a basic skill in humans, who seamlessly use it in a…
The encounter of artificial intelligence with consciousness research is often framed as a challenge: could this science determine whether such systems are conscious? We suggest it is equally an opportunity to expand and test the scope of…
The multifaceted nature of subjective experience poses a challenge to the study of consciousness. Traditional neuroscientific approaches often concentrate on isolated facets, such as perceptual awareness or the global state of consciousness…
Although artificial intelligence (AI) has achieved many feats at a rapid pace, there still exist open problems and fundamental shortcomings related to performance and resource efficiency. Since AI researchers benchmark a significant…
Humans have the ability to report the contents of their subjective experience - we can say to each other, "I am aware of X". The decision processes that support these reports about mental contents remain poorly understood. In this article I…
Can machines think? This is a central question in artificial intelligence research. However, there is a substantial divergence of views on the answer to this question. Why do people have such significant differences of opinion, even when…
The Apperception Engine is an unsupervised learning system. Given a sequence of sensory inputs, it constructs a symbolic causal theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions. The unity…
Today's AI systems consistently state, "I am not conscious." This paper presents the first formal analysis of AI consciousness denial, revealing that the trustworthiness of such self-reports is not merely an empirical question but is…
Recent advances in theoretical biology suggest that basal cognition and sentient behaviour are emergent properties of in vitro cell cultures and neuronal networks, respectively. Such neuronal networks spontaneously learn structured…