Paras Chopra
Lossfunk (founder)
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Position on AI consciousness
Chopra's position is functionalist, that consciousness science progresses by testing what awareness does under controlled comparison and by building candidate architectures rather than by argument alone, and his lab's programme treats the functional profile as the empirical anchor that indicator-based AI consciousness assessments currently lack.
Paras Chopra founded Lossfunk, the research lab behind the full-stack functionalist theory of consciousness programme, after a career that ran from founding the A/B testing company Wingify to writing publicly on evolution, complexity, and machine intelligence. The lab’s consciousness working paper, posted to arXiv on September 27, 2026 with Sushrut Thorat, is method-first. It asks, for a content X and process Y, whether awareness of X changes how X can be used in Y, and it accepts only comparisons that rule out information-quality confounds through performance matching, diagnostic dissociations, and non-monotonic reversals.
The profile that survives the standard is small by design. Goal-sensitive control, especially the regulation of attentional influence, is the strongest function. Metacognitive evaluation is weaker but converging. Feature binding proceeds without awareness. The paper then argues that a full-stack functionalist theory also needs an explanatory profile, the structure of presentation, subject-world organisation, awareness judgments, and problem reports, and that the two profiles meet only through abductive construction, candidate architectures implemented and intervened on, with Attention Schema Theory as the worked example.
Chopra’s placement on this site is the functionalist family, and the programme’s restraint on AI systems is part of the position. The paper makes no claims about current models. It supplies instead the comparison discipline that any future attribution argument would need to satisfy, which is why the programme earns coverage in the assessment-methodology cluster alongside the credence frameworks and indicator checklists this site tracks.
Known for. Founding the Lossfunk research lab, the full-stack functionalist theory of consciousness programme, writing on evolution and complexity at Lossfunc
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Sushrut ThoratLossfunkThe full-stack functionalist theory of consciousness programme, the aware-unaware comparison method, the functional profile of awareness
- Hedayat AbedijooACE Conscious Studio / IndependentACE.await (2026), the ACE decision framework (Agency, Connection, Exchange)
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Blaise Agüera y ArcasGoogle VP and Fellow, CTO of Technology & SocietyComputational functionalism, active inference, on-device neural computing, What Is Intelligence? (2025), and Who Are We Now? (2023)
- Igor AleksanderImperial College LondonAxiomatic Consciousness Theory, neural state machines, The World in My Mind, pioneering neural network engineering
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Joscha BachCalifornia Institute for Machine ConsciousnessThe machine consciousness hypothesis, cyber animism, and MicroPsi
- Talis BachmannUniversity of TartuAttention-awareness theory, the preactivation hypothesis for conscious perception, masking and the microgenesis of awareness, perception without awareness
Paras Chopra is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.