[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2026, 4:59 PM Brent Allsop via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> It is really powerful to be able to ask AI questions about this.
>

Yes it makes the whole research process completely different.


I'm still working on getting my head around all this interesting stuff.
>

I appreciate that Brent!

Let me know if you have any questions that you don't trust the AI's answers
for. ;-)

Jason


> On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 8:12 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> 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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