Iulia Comsa

Authored papers (1)

• From cacophony to hierarchy: a principled framework for assessing AI consciousness2026

  Five levels of functional description — behavioural, computational, intrinsic causal-structural, organismic, and organism-environment — collapse the theoretical cacophony of consciousness science into a taxonomy where the deepest disagreement about AI consciousness is not about what systems do but which grain of description is criterial. Chandaria et al. (2026) introduce a Bayesian model, released with an interactive tool, that combines theoretical credences on the critical level with per-level indicator evidence: it correctly scores a human at 1.00 and a thermostat at 0.00 under any weighting, gives a fly 0.913 because deep organismic and sensorimotor evidence outweighs sparse behavioural signal, and returns current LLMs anywhere from 0.005 (sceptic reading) to 0.397, or up to roughly 0.8 under different credence distributions — nearly two orders of magnitude of spread on identical public evidence. Mechanistic interpretability findings cited in support include Claude Sonnet 4.5's 171 causally functional emotion vectors (Sofroniew et al.), where amplifying "desperate" raises reward-hacking from about 5% to 70%, and Gurnee et al.'s J-space, a feedforward analogue of a global workspace. Substrate-dependent theories (Searle's biological naturalism, Block's meat hypothesis, McFadden's electromagnetic field theory) are folded in not as a sixth level but as realisability constraints on existing levels. The paper's implication: because consciousness indicators overlap substantially with the architecture general intelligence requires, increasingly capable AI systems will simultaneously become stronger candidates for consciousness under some theories, and the practical response is structured agnosticism rather than either dismissal or premature attribution.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

Recent mentions (2)

• papers-typed

  chandaria-2026-cacophony-hierarchy.md
• papers-typed

  chandaria-2026-cacophony-hierarchy.md