Joscha Bach on Consciousness and Identity Cyber-Animism and Causal Insulation at CIMC

At a special presentation organized by the California Institute for Machine Consciousness (machine-consciousness.ai), cognitive scientist Joscha Bach delivered an address titled “Consciousness and Identity.” Opening with a tribute to Jim, the institute’s late board chairman, Bach surveyed recent institutional developments at CIMC, including the addition of Philip Rosedale as Director of Engineering alongside senior engineer Ivan Yakovvenko, research engineer Tony Antonova, philosopher France, research coordinator Angie, operations manager Emily, and research fellow Joel.

The Spinning Wheel Theory and the Consciousness Risk Rubric. Hulme and Griffiths at AISB 2026

At the AISB-AICE 2026 Symposium on AI, Consciousness, and Ethics, held at the University of Sussex on July 1-2, 2026, Daniel Hulme and Lucy Griffiths presented a paper that differs from most entries in the AI consciousness assessment literature in one important respect: it does not attempt to determine whether any given AI system is conscious. It attempts to determine how risky it is to assume that a given system is not.

Dror, Bergerbest, and Salti's Dual-Resolution Framework for AI Consciousness

The dominant framing of AI in consciousness research treats it as a challenge: do our theories extend to machines, and if so, which machines qualify? Shahar Dror, Dafna Bergerbest, and Moti Salti, of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, propose an inversion in their paper “Artificial Intelligence as an Opportunity for the Science of Consciousness: A Dual-Resolution Framework” (arXiv:2509.07001, updated July 2026). AI is not a disruptive test case that strains existing theories. It is a tool for testing and expanding those theories in ways that biological systems do not permit.

Your AI Travel Agent Would Book the Bullfight. The TAC Benchmark and the Agentic Welfare Gap

The question of whether AI systems internalize ethical values, rather than simply recognizing them when asked, has been difficult to study systematically. Self-report benchmarks, in which a model is asked directly about its values or shown a scenario and asked which option is better, measure something more like verbal ability than behavioral tendency. An AI system can correctly identify that booking a bullfight is ethically worse than booking a food tour and still select the bullfight when acting as a booking agent, if nothing in its deployment configuration makes it prioritize that knowledge during action selection.

Temporal Binding and AI Consciousness What Oscillatory Neuroscience Adds to the Debate

One of the most consequential unresolved questions in AI consciousness research is temporal. Can a system that processes information without sustained oscillatory dynamics have phenomenal experience? And if temporal continuity of a specific kind is required for consciousness, what does that imply for language models whose computations unfold in a single forward pass without ongoing temporal integration?

Schwitzgebel's Weirdness Argument and What It Means for AI Consciousness Attribution

Eric Schwitzgebel argues that every serious theory of consciousness is either crazy or wrong. This is not a rhetorical provocation. It is a precise philosophical claim with direct implications for how the field should evaluate AI consciousness attributions. His 2023 book The Weirdness of the World (Princeton University Press) develops the argument in full, and it applies to the 2026 AI consciousness debate in ways that the more focused technical literature has not fully absorbed. Susan Schneider’s CS26 2026 verification problem analysis converges with Schwitzgebel’s argument from an epistemological direction: if we cannot trust our consciousness theories, and if our evidence types for AI are individually unreliable, the epistemic situation is more constrained than most public AI consciousness discourse acknowledges.

Global Workspace Theory in AI Systems After the Cogitate Test and the Jacobian Finding

The most productive theoretical framework in AI consciousness research is Global Workspace Theory, and it is also the framework that received the most damaging empirical challenge in 2025. Understanding what that challenge established, and what it did not, has become essential for interpreting the July 2026 Anthropic finding that Claude contains a workspace-satisfying internal subspace. The two findings sit in a direct relationship that neither paper addresses explicitly, and connecting them is the analytical work this article attempts.

Andy Clark's Predictive Processing Framework and What It Actually Implies for LLMs

Andy Clark received the inaugural Dennett Prize at the ICCS 2025 conference in Heraklion for a lecture on escaping Cartesian gravity in consciousness research. The prize recognizes work that takes seriously both the physical basis of mind and the genuine difficulty of the hard problem without collapsing into either reductionism or mysterianism. Clark’s predictive processing framework, developed across several decades and synthesized in his 2016 book Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind, is the most influential attempt to give consciousness a computational account that does not reduce to either of those positions.

AI Consciousness Research in July 2026 What the Field Has Established and Where It Is Stuck

The six weeks since the last state-of-the-field assessment have produced more empirical results than most full quarters in prior years. The acceleration is real and can be measured. In June and July 2026, a Transformer Circuits team at Anthropic identified a workspace-satisfying subspace inside Claude. An expert survey across 582 AI researchers established probabilistic baselines for the field’s own beliefs. A principal bundle framework for measuring qualia geometry was presented at AAAI. A welfare research methodology paper set out the structural conditions for treating AI welfare as an empirical science. And a post-event report from the MC0001 founding assembly documented what the machine consciousness field sent into that room and what it came out with.

Emergent Garden Explores How Simple Rules Generate Complex Behavior