Franz Hildebrandt-Harangozó

Authored papers (1)

• cimcWhitepaper

  Consciousness is a coherence-maximizing pattern implemented through self-organized second-order perception in self-organizing substrates — this is the core claim of the Machine Consciousness Hypothesis (MCH) advanced by the California Institute for Machine Consciousness (CIMC) in their April 2026 founding whitepaper. The MCH holds that general computational machines with sufficient resources possess the necessary and sufficient means to implement consciousness, and that the relevant test is interpretive validation of internal structure rather than behavioral output — a direct response to the demonstrated insufficiency of linguistic behavioral tests given that current LLMs produce conscious-sounding outputs through pattern-matching without evidence of the underlying functional organization. The framework adopts computational functionalism, combining Wolfram's (2002) Principle of Computational Equivalence with epistemological computationalism (Bach and Verdicchio, 2012), and situates consciousness as the simplest learning algorithm discoverable by evolutionary search to bootstrap coherent agency in a self-organizing substrate whose architecture is not pre-specified. CIMC's operational definition — a system is conscious if it implements self-organized second-order perception that increases global coherence — generates testable predictions about developmental trajectories, functional signatures, and phase transitions, to be evaluated through Request Confirmation Networks, Neural Cellular Automata experiments, and interpretability of representational embedding spaces. The paper argues this implies that consciousness research requires philosophy and construction to discipline each other, that behavioral testing of existing systems is insufficient as the primary methodology, and that the field's current fragmentation across neuroscience, philosophy, welfare organizations, and commercial labs leaves the constructive-interpretive approach unoccupied — the position CIMC is designed to fill.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

Recent mentions (1)

• machine-consciousness

  cimcWhitepaper.md