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arXiv · 2608.28824

Discovering Machine Correlates of Consciousness

Romain Salvi·Ouri Wolfson
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Abstract

Currently, in biological systems Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) are characterized in terms of EEG and FMRI signals. Unfortunately, this characterization prevents the transferability of the NCCs concept to machines. Such transferability would be useful in order to investigate AI consciousness. In this paper we provide an alternate characterization that is transferable, and enables the analogous definition of Machine Correlates of Consciousness (MCCs). Specifically, we propose that NCCs (MCCs) are substrate-level signals that are not under human (AI agent) control, and that are reliably modulated by emotions. This paper presents the first empirical investigation of MCCs. Specifically, we present the results of experiments conducted with two LLMs, Llama-2 7B and Llama-3.1 70B parameters. In these LLMs we collect hardware anomaly traces that are substrate-level indicator-sequences. And we show that after controlling for confounding factors, these are modulated differently by emotional and neutral computations. And this difference is statistically significant for the larger Llama-3.1 70B, but not for the smaller Llama-2 7B. The results constitute initial empirical evidence that MCCs are present in the Llama-3.1 70B configuration. And they are consistent with the hypothesis that consciousness probability and degree increase with the LLM sophistication. Independently of consciousness, MCCs can also be used for detection of emotions in AI agents.

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Romain Salvi, Ouri Wolfson. 2026-08-28. Discovering Machine Correlates of Consciousness. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-33195-3_18

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