Year: 2009
Type: preprint
Abstract: This record contains two companion preprints. The primary file is the main paper, A Closure Architecture for Consciousness. The second file is its companion, When a public self-description cannot keep a system alive: exact forcing of a predictive self-coordinate. A Closure Architecture for Consciousness. Formal theories of consciousness often put three claims in one sentence: a mathematical claim, an empirical claim, and a claim about what a structure would be. We propose a structural architecture for consciousness that keeps them apart. It specifies eight conditions that a self-maintaining system would meet: it forms stable objects, carries a finer description that its public one cannot recover, keeps a predictive coordinate for itself, hides its determining state from a given interface, credits its actions correctly, maintains a funded order in time, binds separate contents, and stays viable under maintenance. Each condition is stated in standard finite mathematics. By proofs and exact finite computation on small systems, we establish exact results about what the conditions recast: privacy, the explanatory gap, reports, zombies, free will, introspection, the meta-problem, binding, the specious present, the prices of constraints, quality spaces, inverted spectra, personal identity, and combination. Schemas, one composition relative to a convention, and proposed readings such as valence as a price are marked as such. The question whether meeting the architecture would be being conscious is split into seven graded parts. A machine-checked bridge derives realization only from two premises that anyone may refuse, and no integrated instance has been exhibited. We report no empirical test and state what one would require. The companion paper isolates one question that can be answered exactly: when must a system track something about itself that its public self-description leaves out? On a small finite system, a walker on a wheel with a hidden phase that can slip and a deadline at which the correct turn depends on that phase, exhaustive enumeration in exact arithmetic shows that every policy acting on the public position alone has an empty viability kernel, that a policy also reading the predictive state keeps ten of twelve states safe, and that exactly one minimal refinement of the public description restores viability. Two controls show that both the deadline and the live slip are necessary. The result makes no empirical claim and says nothing about whether any system is conscious. Code, exact result data, and selected Lean declarations: https://github.com/ioannist/six-birds-consciousness.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Institutions: Instituto Mayor Campesino, CERMICS, Instituto del Mar del Peru
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1632099477