the-mind
A definition-driven synthesis of mind (based on Joscha Bach’s public work)

What is consciousness?

Consciousness is the fact that experience shows up at all: there is something it is like to be you, right now. You are confronted with a present, and the world appears from a point of view. talk: Joscha Bach: The AI perspective on Consciousness

The puzzle is connecting that familiar phenomenology to mechanism: why should any physical process feel like anything from the inside? interview: Joscha Bach Λ Karl Friston: Ai, Death, Self, God, Consciousness

On this view, consciousness is not a mysterious extra substance or “spark”. It is an architectural feature: a functional organization that stabilizes a coherent point of view. interview: Joscha Bach Λ Karl Friston: Ai, Death, Self, God, Consciousness

A working definition

We will use consciousness to mean: a control-relevant organization that stabilizes and coordinates mental contents into a coherent point of view. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

Triangulation: three perspectives that should not be collapsed

A practical discipline is to keep three perspectives distinct when explaining consciousness: phenomenology (what it is like), mechanism (what is implemented), and function (what it does for the agent). talk: Joscha Bach: The AI perspective on Consciousness

Function: coherence control (the “conductor” role)

Functionally, consciousness is framed as the process that makes disagreements between subsystems legible and resolvable at the level of the whole agent. The result is a coherent controller rather than a bundle of competing local policies. interview: Joscha Bach Λ Karl Friston: Ai, Death, Self, God, Consciousness

Mechanism: workspace-like integration + an observer model

Mechanistically, one implementation route is workspace-like integration: selected content becomes globally available for coordination across otherwise specialized subsystems. The key claim is not “a place in the brain”, but a role that enables broadcast, comparison, and reconciliation. talk: AGI Series 2024 - Joscha Bach: Is Consciousness a Missing Link to AGI?

In this framing, the system maintains and stabilizes an observer reference frame as part of the loop: it is not a metaphysical entity, but a model component that makes the integration process stable and reportable. talk: Mind from Matter (Lecture By Joscha Bach)

Phenomenology: “nowness” as stabilization-from-the-inside

Phenomenologically, “nowness” is treated as how the stabilization loop appears from the inside: a coherence bubble in which the model’s active contents are synchronized tightly enough to be experienced as present. Second-order perception (“perception of perception”) is one handle for this: the model represents not only contents, but the fact that contents are being represented, which stabilizes the observer variable. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

Why there is no easy test

This framing implies there is no Turing-test-style shortcut: performance alone does not tell you whether the system implements the stabilizing observer organization. Consciousness is treated as a hypothesis about internal organization, not a behavior score. talk: The Machine Consciousness Hypothesis

References