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Consciousness as a Functor

Published: August 25, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2508.17561v1

By: Sridhar Mahadevan

Potential Business Impact:

Explains how thoughts move between conscious and unconscious.

Business Areas:
Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence, Data and Analytics, Science and Engineering, Software

We propose a novel theory of consciousness as a functor (CF) that receives and transmits contents from unconscious memory into conscious memory. Our CF framework can be seen as a categorial formulation of the Global Workspace Theory proposed by Baars. CF models the ensemble of unconscious processes as a topos category of coalgebras. The internal language of thought in CF is defined as a Multi-modal Universal Mitchell-Benabou Language Embedding (MUMBLE). We model the transmission of information from conscious short-term working memory to long-term unconscious memory using our recently proposed Universal Reinforcement Learning (URL) framework. To model the transmission of information from unconscious long-term memory into resource-constrained short-term memory, we propose a network economic model.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
31 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Artificial Intelligence