ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
A theory of consciousness from a theoretical computer science perspective: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Naturalizing perceptual experience: the explanatory power of probabilistic computation and the holographic solution.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2026Article
- A Categorical Model of General Consciousness.Biomimetics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Consciousness or pseudo-consciousness? A clash of two paradigms.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- Theories of consciousness from the perspective of an embedded processes view.Psychological review · 2025Review
- The recent Physics and Chemistry Nobel Prizes, AI, and the convergence of knowledge fields.Patterns (New York, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- The Constrained Disorder Principle May Account for Consciousness.Brain sciences · 2024Review
- Toward a universal theory of consciousness.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Design and evaluation of a global workspace agent embodied in a realistic multimodal environment.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2024Article
- The case for neurons: a no-go theorem for consciousness on a chip.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2024Article
- Eight challenges in developing theory of intelligence.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2024Article
- Multilevel development of cognitive abilities in an artificial neural network.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A blueprint for conscious machines.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A theory of consciousness from a theoretical computer science perspective: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A conceptual framework for consciousness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
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Abstract
This paper examines consciousness from the perspective of theoretical computer science (TCS), a branch of mathematics concerned with understanding the underlying principles of computation and complexity, including the implications and surprising consequences of resource limitations. We propose a formal TCS model, the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM). The CTM is influenced by Alan Turing's simple yet powerful model of computation, the Turing machine (TM), and by the global workspace theory (GWT) of consciousness originated by cognitive neuroscientist Bernard Baars and further developed by him, Stanislas Dehaene, Jean-Pierre Changeux, George Mashour, and others. Phenomena generally associated with consciousness, such as blindsight, inattentional blindness, change blindness, dream creation, and free will, are considered. Explanations derived from the model draw confirmation from consistencies at a high level, well above the level of neurons, with the cognitive neuroscience literature.
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