Neurosci Conscious
August 27, 2021
Camilo Miguel Signorelli, Joanna Szczotka, Robert Prentner
93 citations
Different models of consciousness subscribe to different notions of explanation, use different tools, and aim to explain different phenomena, making direct comparison difficult. A framework is presented that compares models along three minimal dimensions: mode of explanation, mechanisms of explanation, and target of explanation. The approach may help identify driving assumptions, theoretical commitments, and experimental predictions, and points toward more integrative theoretical research where axiomatic models could resolve current contradictions.
Neuroscience of Consciousness
August 29, 2022
Camilo Miguel Signorelli, Ignacio Cea, Robert Prentner
8 citations
Integrated information theory (IIT) aims to explain consciousness by linking its subjective structure to physical systems without reducing it to neural activity alone. This article identifies ambiguities in IIT, particularly tensions between its claim that experience is ontologically and epistemologically primary and its goal of explaining consciousness in physical, operational terms. The authors propose ways to resolve these issues and suggest alternative explanatory approaches—mathematical, processual, and autonomy-based—that may better guide future models of consciousness. The goal is to clarify points of contention for both supporters and critics of IIT.
Robert Prentner
6 citations
preprint
Conscious inner life appears structured, with unity of consciousness as a key feature. This paper outlines three aspects of that unity—environmental embedding, mutual constraint between local and global representations, and top-down object formation—and formalizes them using mathematical relations in a phenomenal space defined by mereological and topological concepts. A projector-based calculus describes the dynamical structure of this space. The approach reframes the mind-matter problem as a series of transitions between structured layers of experience rather than a single brain-to-mind leap, offering a precise framework for theoretical questions in cognitive science and consciousness studies.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Robert Prentner, Donald D Hoffman
5 citations
Consciousness science is at an impasse, and the physicalist worldview is blamed. Conscious agent theory (CAT) posits that consciousness is fundamental and exists outside spacetime, with agency and mathematical structure as core features. For CAT to become a robust scientific framework, it must integrate with the interface theory of perception (ITP), an evolutionary model of perception. ITP suggests that perception is an interface that hides reality, not a window onto it. The authors argue that we live inside a simulation instantiated in consciousness, not digitally, where the simulation is an interface representation of conscious agents' dynamics. This implies AI could be used in consciousness science by customizing this interface.
Artificial General Intelligence
January 1, 2026
Robert Prentner
A framework called SLP-tests offers three criteria—subjective-linguistic, latent-emergent, and phenomenological-structural—to assess whether an AI system's interface representations enable consciousness-like properties. Using category theory, interface representations are modeled as mappings between relational substrates and observable behaviors. The approach reframes subjective experience not as an intrinsic property of physical systems but as a functional interface to a relational entity, making the question of artificial consciousness empirically testable.
Entropy (Basel, Switzerland)
January 9, 2023
Donald D Hoffman, Chetan Prakash, Robert Prentner
Conscious subjects and experiences are entities beyond spacetime, not within it. Their dynamics are described by Markov chains. Agents can combine into more complex agents, fuse into simpler agents, and qualia fuse to create new qualia. The possible dynamics of n agents form an n(n-1)-dimensional polytope with n^n vertices, the Markov polytope M_n. The total fusions of n agents and qualia form an (n-1)-dimensional simplex, the fusion simplex F_n. Projecting these dynamics onto spacetime yields scattering processes: a new map from Markov chains to decorated permutations encodes physical information for scattering amplitudes. Spacetime and scattering processes are a data structure coding for interactions of conscious agents; a particle in spacetime is a projection of the Markovian dynamics of a communicating class of conscious agents.