The Organisation of Mind: A Theory of Experience, Cognition and Selfhood

A person can feel pain, recognise a sound, remember an event and reflect on who they are. An artificial system can describe these activities and sometimes reproduce aspects of the behaviour associated with them. What would explain the presence of experience in either case? What evidence could help us decide? The Organisation of Mind brings together eleven papers that approach these questions as parts of a larger problem. The project seeks to explain how experience could arise in a physical system, how it could acquire different qualities, and how a system could come to understand some of its experiences as its own. The proposed account starts with living organisation. Cells continually maintain and repair the machinery on which their activity depends. The papers develop the idea of “closure of maintenance” to describe how this machinery and the conditions it requires sustain one another. They then propose that this organisation provides the basis for a minimal form of felt experience, termed “vivense”. The later papers explore what would be needed to move from this proposed elementary experience to more complex forms of mind. They consider how information is processed, how learning and past encounters shape experience, and how prediction, memory, action and social interaction contribute to the development of selfhood. A further strand examines the limits of our judgments about other minds. This includes the interpretation of artificial systems that claim or deny having inner experiences, and the physical conditions that artificial consciousness might require. The collection presents a developing theory with arguments, models and consequences that can be challenged and investigated. It distinguishes its computational findings from its broader claims about consciousness, and identifies proposed studies that have not yet been carried out. Its purpose is to give researchers a connected account to assess and a clearer set of questions for further work.