Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Consciousness — experience and its theories — phenomenal consciousness, its measures and its attribution to animals or machines (group: philosophy).
11 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-046 v2 | What criterion, applied the same way to a modular mind and to an organized group, would say whether an organized whole is a subject of experience and not only an agent? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-165, CLAIM-155, CLAIM-003 and QUESTION-032. THEORY-043 and THEORY-063 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-048 v3 | What can report, no-report, deficit and architectural evidence each establish about experience as opposed to access, and does any of it survive in a system that lacks cortex or biology? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-039 and CLAIM-003. THEORY-091, THEORY-094, THEORY-100 and THEORY-023 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-059 v2 | Does a state that meets a functional characterization of affect thereby have to be felt, or does feeling need a mechanism, such as a body acting on the neurons that map it, that an organization lacks? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-039 and QUESTION-053. THEORY-101, THEORY-045, THEORY-090, THEORY-093 and THEORY-095 bear on it; none answers it as posed, and the body gives each one’s limit. Deferred with its line. | Deferred |
| QUESTION-061 v3 | In a brain, is conscious access one exclusive broadcast that reaches every specialised processor at once, or can a content be accessed by some consumers and not others? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-003. THEORY-096, the global workspace account, offers the uniform answer. THEORY-098, THEORY-102, THEORY-103 and THEORY-245 bear on it without settling a part, and the body gives each one’s limit. Deferred with its line. | Deferred |
| QUESTION-121 v2 | Within a single mind, what plays the part of the operator model’s independent scoring: what evidence reaches a judgement–observation loop, or what scores it, without passing through the interpretation it tests, and does any of it survive the loss of all action? | Left open by CLAIM-342, which says what anchors a judgement–observation loop is evidence whose arrival or scoring does not pass through the interpretation it tests, as Regime B’s independent scoring does in CLAIM-330. In a population of operators that scoring can be supplied from outside. In one mind it has to come from somewhere, and if it needs action, CLAIM-339 wins. Filed with five candidates from the record. It separates two things the locked-in case runs together: evidence the loop did not select, which a paralysed person still receives, and contingency between intention and outcome, which they lose. | Open |
| QUESTION-254 v6 | What separates an interpretive organization that constitutes an experiential perspective from one that only processes information, or only represents a perspective, when the separation must not require an episode’s current contents to be veridically constrained by their referents, must not be drawn from the verdict it gives on groups and machines, and must justify the queries, interventions and timescales by which it individuates a perspective without appeal to the phenomenal unity it is meant to explain? | The question the exchange of 2026-10-21 ended each pass on. A3: “What differentiates an interpretation that merely processes information from an interpretation that constitutes a perspective?” A5 proposed it for this line. A6 sharpened it to a class of realized organizations “whose identity and unity are invariant under changes in sensory grounding”, distinguished from systems “that merely simulate or report the same interpretations”. The grounding condition is narrowed here to current veridical grounding, as CLAIM-413 states it, and the question asks for the targets of individuation to be justified too. It narrows QUESTION-046 to the constitutive thesis, CLAIM-412. An answer is that thesis’s missing sufficiency condition, which CLAIM-411 presses. | Open |
| QUESTION-255 v6 | Can an empirical model that genuinely fails to glue, under a specified cover and correspondence between its contexts, take part in one phenomenally unified process, given that a unified experience can contain conflicting interpretations or demands and that such conflicts are not by themselves gluing obstructions? | A7 §10 of the exchange of 2026-10-21, after A6 found a sheaf-theoretic account of global phenomenal unity. The record’s self line already reads a coherent self as a global section (CLAIM-153), and conflict without an overlap as no disunity (CLAIM-198). A7 denied that experiential unity is “the existence of one globally consistent assignment of interpretations”: “the conflict itself can be a unified experience”, and a global assignment “could exist in a merely descriptive model without any corresponding unified process”. A review of 2026-10-22 corrected the example: a felt conflict need not be a gluing failure, since one global state can hold both sides. The question is whether a model that genuinely fails to glue, under a cover and correspondence fixed independently, can be part of one unified experience. | Open |
| QUESTION-266 | Can felt valence be operationalized, for systems that report and systems that cannot, by three layers measured independently, an ordering serving as the negotiation’s potential in the system’s conflicts, a hedonic marker that does not depend on choice, and the system’s own model of its potential, and do the layers dissociate where the potential account and its rivals say they should? | Filed at the owner’s direction, 2026-10-23, after a survey of work near the record’s account of valence as ordering-potential (CLAIM-440) for ways to operationalize felt states. Three layers, each with existing measures: potential (a conflict record, estimated arbitration weights); a hedonic marker independent of choice (taste reactivity, judgement bias, reports of experienced utility); and the system’s model of its own potential (confidence and metacognition paradigms). The claims are tested where the layers come apart. | Open |
| QUESTION-350 | With V1/V2 and category-selective cortex densely sampled in the same subjects, during clearly seen images held for over a second, is content-specific gamma-band phase or amplitude coupling between them, with the evoked response removed, again brief or absent at a sensitivity that detects it elsewhere, or is it sustained for the duration of the image? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-296, moved here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted it under ADR-065. COGITATE’s iEEG (LIT-973, read in NOTE-812) had 12 V1/V2 electrodes, and the authors grant that the null “could stem from methodological limitations”. | Open |
| QUESTION-351 | Recorded with single units or dense bilateral prefrontal sampling in a no-report or task-irrelevant design, is a clearly seen image’s category present in prefrontal cortex while its identity and orientation, decodable posteriorly in the same subjects, are absent there with Bayesian support for the absence, and does prefrontal cortex stay silent at stimulus offset under an equally sensitive test? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-245, moved here when the status review of 2026-10-30 narrowed and promoted it under ADR-065. COGITATE (LIT-973, read in NOTE-812) recorded high gamma, MEG and BOLD, with no single units; whether the pattern holds in signals it did not sample is open. | Open |
| QUESTION-368 | Would a system that had phenomenal experience but no phenomenal self-model and no valence, as minimal phenomenal experience is described, have moral standing, and on what ground, given that the argument for a moratorium on synthetic phenomenology locates the risk in a self that can suffer? | From the reading of Metzinger 2024 (LIT-1943, pp. 484–485). There artificial consciousness is risky because it “may involve a consciously experienced sense of self that may in turn generate artificial suffering”. Minimal phenomenal experience is described as conscious, selfless and “involv[ing] no psychological suffering whatsoever”. The book asks whether building a machine that stays in that state would be wrong. It does not ask whether such a machine would be owed anything. TERM-083 lists sentience as one ground of standing and TERM-082 keeps phenomenal consciousness apart from it. The question is whether phenomenality without a self or valence is a ground. An answer is an argued position on that ground, or a showing that the case is incoherent. | Open |