Front Psychol
May 7, 2025
Monia D'Angiò, Luca Simione, Xerxes D. Arsiwalla et al.
This collection of articles presents diverse perspectives on consciousness research, including new theories and methodological frameworks. Fink proposes direct neurophenomenal structuralism linking neural structures to experience without intermediate explanations. Josipovic argues conscious awareness does not require mental representations, highlighting non-dual awareness with an implicit-explicit gradient. Oblak et al. demonstrate personalized network models can incorporate qualitative phenomenology in clinical psychiatry. Tsuchiya et al. propose the Quantum-like Qualia hypothesis, treating qualia as observables affected by measurement. Andersen's Maps of Meaning theory defines consciousness as a byproduct of goal prioritization.
arXiv Preprint Archive
May 2, 2024
Xerxes D. Arsiwalla
The phenomenal content of conscious experience—what it feels like to have an experience—is constituted by subjectively attributed meaning, which is intrinsic and non-representational. This subjective meaning is ubiquitous in conscious experiences and is related to Frege's "sense" and Peirce's "interpretant." The authors extend Frege's sense to raw feels of consciousness and argue that both sense and reference play roles in phenomenal experience. They formalize subjective meaning as a relational attribute realized by a map interpreting syntactic structures of a formal system within a semantic space. The image of this map in the mental domain comprises the phenomenal content of qualia, with implications for experience-based theories of consciousness.
arXiv Preprint Archive
January 11, 2018
Xerxes D. Arsiwalla, Paul Verschure
A new framework using information-theoretic complexity measures, such as integrated information, has been proposed to quantitatively classify states of consciousness, addressing both phenomenological contents and clinical disorders. However, applying these measures to realistic brain networks is difficult due to high computational costs. This article serves as a lookup table of principle-based and empirically tested measures of consciousness, with emphasis on clinical applicability for assisting diagnosis and therapy. It addresses challenges facing these measures with regard to realistic brain networks and suggests possible resolutions.
arXiv Preprint Archive
May 31, 2017
Xerxes D. Arsiwalla, Ricard Sole, Clement Moulin-Frier et al.
A complexity-based morphospace with three axes—autonomous, cognitive, and social complexity—can represent both biological and synthetic conscious systems. Awareness corresponds to computational complexity and wakefulness to autonomous complexity. Consciousness is argued to function as an evolutionary game-theoretic strategy, motivating social complexity as a third dimension. The framework yields a taxonomy of four types of consciousness based on embodiment: biological, synthetic, group, and simulated. This classification aids in identifying design principles for engineering conscious machines and in comparing signatures of consciousness across domains relevant to cognitive neuroscience, AI, and biomimetics.