Models of Consciousness 7: Copenhagen Will Test Whether Mathematical Consciousness Science Has Found Its Footing

The seventh conference in the Models of Consciousness series runs October 12 through 16, 2026 at the University of Copenhagen’s North Campus. The event is organized by the Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science (AMCS) and the abstract submission deadline for talks and posters is June 16, 2026 — two weeks from today.

The AMCS was founded to bring formal methods to consciousness research: mathematical modeling, quantitative measures, and computational frameworks applied to the problems that consciousness science has historically addressed through philosophical argument and qualitative neuroscience. MoC7 is the biennial gathering of researchers working within that programme, and its Copenhagen edition is notable for an explicit focus on AI and large language models as a research domain within consciousness science.

What the AMCS Does and Why MoC7 Matters

The AMCS’s defining commitment is that the questions consciousness science asks, what consciousness is, how it is measured, how it relates to information processing and physical substrate, can be addressed more precisely through formal modeling than through the argumentative traditions of philosophy or the descriptive traditions of neuroscience. This is a methodological claim, not a theoretical one: the AMCS does not advocate for a specific consciousness theory. It advocates for the rigor that mathematical formalization provides when multiple theories are in competition.

The distinction matters because the current state of the field is precisely one of theoretical competition under methodological underdetermination. IIT, GWT, Higher-Order Thought theories, predictive processing accounts, and several others each make predictions about what consciousness is and where it appears. They disagree substantially with each other. The Cogitate Consortium’s adversarial test in Nature (2025) found that IIT and GWT each survived the test in some respects and failed in others, which means neither is simply correct and neither is simply wrong. What the field needs is a finer-grained set of tools for distinguishing their predictions and testing them against each other.

The scores-vs-profiles debate that this site has tracked captures one dimension of the formalization problem. Whether consciousness should be measured as a single probability score or as a multidimensional profile across multiple indicators is, at bottom, a question about what the mathematics of consciousness assessment should look like. That debate, which pits the Digital Consciousness Model’s single-score approach against the multidimensional awareness profile of the Just Aware Enough framework, is the kind of question MoC7 was built to address with formal tools rather than philosophical intuition.

The Copenhagen Program: Mathematical Formalism and AI

MoC7’s four core research themes are philosophical foundations in consciousness science, methodologies and models, AI and large language models, and phenomenology and applied phenomenology. The AI and LLM track is explicitly listed as a central component, not an add-on. The organizers have specifically invited “investigations in consciousness science leveraging new methodologies inspired by AI and LLMs,” including machine learning applications and artificial consciousness research.

This positioning makes MoC7 distinctive among consciousness conferences. The AISB symposium at Sussex (July 1-2) approaches AI consciousness through philosophical argument and policy analysis. The ASSC in Santiago (June 30-July 3) approaches it through empirical neuroscience. The ASSC produces experimental findings; MoC7 produces the formal models that those findings must be interpreted against. The two conferences form a natural pipeline: empirical results from Santiago in July become the data that formal models at Copenhagen in October attempt to account for.

The confirmed keynotes include Nobel laureate John O’Keefe (University College London), whose work on place cells and the hippocampal spatial map established the neural basis of cognitive mapping and has been extended to questions about the role of memory and spatial representation in conscious experience. Evan Thompson, philosopher of mind and author of Waking, Dreaming, Being, receives the inaugural Mind-Matter Prize at the conference.

The conference also includes dedicated discussion sessions designed to produce a collective paper representing methodological and conceptual consensus on open field questions. This is an unusual feature for a scientific conference and reflects the AMCS’s field-building ambition: not merely reporting results but producing shared standards of practice.

Abstract Deadline: June 16, 2026

Researchers with work in mathematical or computational consciousness science, including AI consciousness, should submit abstracts by June 16. The submission format is 250 words for 20-minute talks, 30-minute showcase talks, or poster presentations. The conference registration deadline is August 31.

Contact for the organizing committee is moc7-organisers@amcs.science. The conference website is at amcs-community.org.

How MoC7 Fits the 2026 Conference Landscape

The 2026 consciousness conference calendar is unusually dense. MC0001 (Berkeley, May 29-31) addressed the founding of machine consciousness as a formal engineering discipline. ASSC 29 (Santiago, June 30-July 3) brings the empirical science. AISB 2026 (Brighton, July 1-2) brings the philosophy and policy dimensions. MoC7 (Copenhagen, October 12-16) brings the mathematical formalism that all three of the preceding events rely on but cannot, in their respective formats, fully develop.

The formal tools MoC7 will develop or refine in October include measures for consciousness indicators that can be applied across both biological and artificial systems. The field needs those tools before it can make the measurement progress that welfare decisions, governance frameworks, and engineering targets require. The AISB’s commitment to policy-relevant outputs from the philosophy side needs something to be policy-relevant about: namely, a formal specification of what consciousness is and how to measure it that is precise enough to be actionable. MoC7’s job is to advance that specification.

Whether this constitutes progress toward consciousness science having a paradigm, in the technical sense, will depend on whether the tools produced in Copenhagen survive contact with empirical results from ASSC 29 and MC0001. The conference sequence suggests the field is at least attempting that contact in a structured way.