Through the Looking Glass: A Reconstructive Architecture for Machine Access Consciousness
Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium Series May 18, 2026 Nicole Hsing
A cognitive architecture called MIRROR, designed based on theories of access consciousness, separates immediate response generation from asynchronous deliberative processing. It uses an Inner Monologue Manager to create parallel cognitive threads and a Cognitive Controller to synthesize them into a bounded first-person narrative that is reconstructed each turn, mirroring human episodic memory. This narrative functions as an episodic buffer, making information globally available for reasoning. When tested on multi-turn dialogue requiring retention of personal safety constraints amid social pressure, MIRROR-augmented models achieved a 21% average improvement over baselines, with performance gains concentrated in scenarios requiring integration of temporally distant information. The authors do not claim MIRROR is conscious but offer it as a testbed for theoretical predictions.