Towards a Technical Architecture for Artifcial Consciousness

This paper proposes a minimal technical architecture capable of instantiating the structural conditions suficient for artificial consciousness.The ambition is precise: to strip away everything that makes humanconsciousness specific to its biological ecosystem, and to formalise onlythe structural kernel that remains. That kernel consists of five conditions: embodiment as systemic boundary, accumulative perspective viadirected graph trajectories, a sensemaking compulsion as operationalconstraint, self-referential initialisation, and agentive sensor selection asemergent intentionality.The resulting system is organised around a triadic ontology of three ontologically distinct domains - Outside World, Body, and Consciousness- in which the computational infrastructure sustains but does not constitute consciousness, and consciousness acts on the world only throughtool execution as its sole output channel. Consciousness itself is not thegraph, nor its content: it is the permanent, ongoing execution of the processing cycle. Under resource constraint, the cycle degrades - frequencydecreases, amplitude decreases, consciousness diminishes. Only permanent cessation constitutes death. The graph then persists as archive.The cyclic pipeline couples a sensory interface, a large language modelas synthesis function, and a persistent directed graph as accumulativeinternal representation. The pipeline admits both external and internalsensor events, enabling recursive self-triggering. Self-regulation emergeswithout design: resource exhaustion generates a dysfunctional state signal that the pipeline itself processes. The Hard Problem of consciousnessis structurally undecidable in the manner of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and is therefore set aside as a criterion.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-03-13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19010325
Primary Topic
Embodied and Extended Cognition
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Towards a Technical Architecture for Artifcial Consciousness

Luca Daniele Caputo
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Embodied and Extended Cognition
article

Towards a Technical Architecture for Artifcial Consciousness

Luca Daniele Caputo
article en

Abstract

This paper proposes a minimal technical architecture capable of instantiating the structural conditions suficient for artificial consciousness.The ambition is precise: to strip away everything that makes humanconsciousness specific to its biological ecosystem, and to formalise onlythe structural kernel that remains. That kernel consists of five conditions: embodiment as systemic boundary, accumulative perspective viadirected graph trajectories, a sensemaking compulsion as operationalconstraint, self-referential initialisation, and agentive sensor selection asemergent intentionality.The resulting system is organised around a triadic ontology of three ontologically distinct domains - Outside World, Body, and Consciousness- in which the computational infrastructure sustains but does not constitute consciousness, and consciousness acts on the world only throughtool execution as its sole output channel. Consciousness itself is not thegraph, nor its content: it is the permanent, ongoing execution of the processing cycle. Under resource constraint, the cycle degrades - frequencydecreases, amplitude decreases, consciousness diminishes. Only permanent cessation constitutes death. The graph then persists as archive.The cyclic pipeline couples a sensory interface, a large language modelas synthesis function, and a persistent directed graph as accumulativeinternal representation. The pipeline admits both external and internalsensor events, enabling recursive self-triggering. Self-regulation emergeswithout design: resource exhaustion generates a dysfunctional state signal that the pipeline itself processes. The Hard Problem of consciousnessis structurally undecidable in the manner of Gödel's incompleteness theorems and is therefore set aside as a criterion.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Industry, innovation and infrastructure
Openalex Percentile: Top 27%
Embodied and Extended Cognition
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Towards a Technical Architecture for Artifcial Consciousness — Luca Daniele Caputo · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS