Concepts of Consciousness

"A-consciousness is access-consciousness. A representation is A-conscious if it is broadcast for free use in reasoning and for direct "rational" control of action (including reporting)."

Access-Consciousness, p. 208

This operationalizes access as a global broadcast, aligning with information integration and global workspace markers used to study reportable conscious access in brains and, by analogy, in AI systems .

"I see A-consciousness as a cluster concept in which reportability is the element of the cluster that has the smallest weight even though it is often the best practical guide to A-consciousness."

Access-Consciousness, p. 208

Identifies report pathways as practically informative about access, relevant to designing and auditing self-report mechanisms and confidence estimators in AI and to interpreting report-based neural signatures in humans .

"Content is A-conscious in virtue of (a representation with that content) reaching the Executive system, the system that is in charge of rational control of action and speech, ... what makes a typical A-conscious representation A-conscious is what getting to the Executive module sets it up to do, namely affect reasoning and action."

Access-Consciousness, p. 210

Frames access as selective routing to an executive hub, paralleling gating mechanisms in thalamo-cortical control and AI modules like attention masks or MoE routers that regulate downstream influence .

"P-conscious content is phenomenal, whereas A-conscious content is representational. It is of the essence of A-conscious content to play a role in reasoning, and only representational content can figure in reasoning."

Access-Consciousness, p. 209

Separates phenomenal from representational encodings, informing how to interpret model embeddings/SAE latents (representational) vs. putative phenomenal aspects in biological systems .

"Crick and Koch have offered a sketch of an account of how the 35-75 hertz oscillation might contribute to a solution to the "binding problem." ... Representations of colors, shapes and motions of a single object are supposed to involve oscillations that are in phase with one another ... But even if the oscillation hypothesis deals with the informational aspect of the binding problem ... how does it explain what it is like to see something as red in the first place?"

Phenomenal Consciousness, p. 207

Links phase-synchronized oscillations to temporal binding mechanisms consistent with coordination accounts of access, yet stresses the gap to phenomenality—useful when relating neural rhythms to AI timing/routing schedules .

"S is a reflexively conscious state of mine H S is accompanied by a thought—arrived at non-inferentially and non-observationally—to the effect that I am in S. ... It is obvious that phenomenal consciousness without HOT and HOT without phenomenal consciousness are both conceptually possible."

Monitoring-Consciousness, p. 215

Clarifies that metacognitive report/introspection channels (HOT) are separable from phenomenality, a principle that guides evaluation of AI introspection/verifier modules vis-à-vis genuine access or experience-related processes .