Florentin Koch

Florentin Koch is a researcher at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin, working on the philosophy and cognitive science of self-modification, metacognition, and artificial consciousness. His March 2026 working paper “What does a system modify when it modifies itself?” (arXiv:2603.27611) introduces a formal framework distinguishing the targets of self-modification, effective rules, represented rules, and causally accessible rules, across four regimes from action without modification to teleological revision. The framework places higher-order theories and Attention Schema Theory as special cases.

In a companion commentary, “From indicators to biology, the calibration problem in artificial consciousness” (arXiv:2603.27597), Koch argues that the indicator-based programme for attributing consciousness to AI is epistemically under-calibrated, and that a more defensible near-term strategy is biologically grounded engineering, including biohybrid, neuromorphic, and connectome-scale systems.

Koch’s work is directly relevant to the site’s self-modelling and calibration interests, and his taxonomies provide precision tools the site’s indicator discipline can use.

Known for. Self-modification framework, teleological revision, higher-order theory applications to artificial systems, the calibration problem in artificial consciousness

Coverage on this site

• What does a system modify when it modifies itself Florentin Koch and the taxonomy of self change August 2026

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Florentin Koch 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.