[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[Jason Resch]

As some of you may know I have been fascinated by questions of
consciousness for many years and have endeavored to write a book on it. The
past five years I have been focused on that writing which has resulted in
hundreds of pages of material:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1-SMVWgQFfImXNRRuuB9kQwhgxPLAwxYL

About a week ago, I decided to try to use the latest AI models to take all
the ideas in that book and condense it to a comparatively short academic
paper, which I am now in the process of submitting for publication.

I thought some on this list, interested in both the possibility of machine
and AI consciousness, as well as the question of how do we empirically
establish the minimum required fidelity for restoring a mind through brain
scanning and uploading, may be interested in what this paper has to say, as
it treats with both of these topics among many others. Here is the abstract:


"Computational functionalism treats cognition as implemented information
processing, but leaves open why experience exists, what determines its
character, which process possesses it, and how it affects behavior. This
paper develops the centered-knowledge thesis: when alternative conditions
select distinct internal states that guide a process’s continuation, that
process knows the difference; possessing that knowledge is the phenomenal
difference. The complete organization of the process’s distinctions and
their causal roles constitutes its phenomenal character. The access
relations that make those distinctions jointly usable individuate the
subject and explain binding and privacy. This identity supplies a
constitutive answer to the hard problem: the explanatory gap arises when
third-person descriptions omit the relation between a usable distinction
and the process for which it is knowledge. A subtraction argument locates
the phenomenal minimum by stripping away report, memory, affect,
reflection, recurrence, and global broadcast while preserving the operative
distinction. From this thesis, the paper derives organizational invariance,
the substitution principle, and multiple realizability, yielding criteria
for how fine-grained neural replacement, brain scanning, and emulation must
be to preserve experience. The boundary that individuates a subject is also
its epistemic horizon: what the subject knows underdetermines its history,
program, substrate, and world. The centered-knowledge thesis yields
consciousness attributions distinct from those of global neuronal
workspace, higher-order, and integrated information theories for
feed-forward systems, faithful emulations, and overlapping centers. We
provide an empirical research program with explicit falsification criteria.
Consciousness is the inside of a difference that guides a process from
within."


And here is a link to the paper:

https://zenodo.org/records/22693134/files/epistemic_horizons_resch_philpapers.pdf?download=1


I would greatly appreciate any feedback, questions, comments, or discussion.
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