Reasoning about conscious experience with axiomatic and graphical mathematics.
Consciousness and cognition October 1, 2021 Camilo Miguel Signorelli, Quanlong Wang, Bob Coecke 4 citations
A mathematical framework using the graphical calculus of process theories (symmetric monoidal categories with Frobenius algebras) provides an ontologically neutral language to model aspects of consciousness. A toy example demonstrates how this axiomatic approach recovers features of conscious experience, including the distinction between external and internal subjective perspectives, the privacy or unreadability of personal subjective experience, and phenomenal unity—a key challenge for scientific studies of consciousness. These features emerge naturally from the compositional structure of the calculus.