Consciousness as a Functor

Sridhar Mahadevan

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arXiv · 2508.17561

Consciousness as a Functor

Sridhar Mahadevan

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Abstract

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.

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Sridhar Mahadevan. 2025-08-25. Consciousness as a Functor. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17561

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