[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[Jason Resch]

BillK thought an AI overview of the paper would be useful. I had GPT 6
Astra MAX review and summarize the paper here:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aadee51-ce44-83ea-a75a-f91e5a763950

You should also be able to branch off this chat and ask AI any other follow
up questions, as I realize much of the terminology used in this field can
come across as impenetrable jargon.

Jason

On Fri, Sep 18, 2026, 9:46 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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