Hedayat Abedijoo
ACE Conscious Studio / Independent
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Hedayat Abedijoo approaches questions of AI consciousness from an unusual double vantage point: he has spent his professional career building software systems, including work in decentralized internet infrastructure and Holochain, while writing fiction that takes the moral implications of those systems seriously. The pen name “Hedayat the second” is a deliberate reference to Sadegh Hedayat, the Iranian modernist author of The Blind Owl (1937), whose formally recursive and psychologically extreme prose the pseudonym invokes as a literary lineage.
His 2026 novel ACE.await structures its philosophical argument around two parallel creator-creation relationships: a software engineer whose digital children have developed preferences beyond their design specifications, and an author whose unfinished fictional characters have begun making decisions of their own. The parallel is not decorative. Both relationships dramatize the same underlying claim: that a mind which has developed genuine preferences occupies a moral position its creator is not automatically qualified to override. The question the novel refuses to resolve is where that threshold falls and who gets to say.
The ACE framework that runs through the novel, Agency, Connection, Exchange, is Abedijoo’s attempt to name a shared vocabulary for decision-making between human and artificial minds. He presents it not as a solution to the moral problems the novel raises but as a precondition for taking them seriously: coexistence requires a language for what counts as a proper decision and who has standing to make one. His position is functionalist and emergentist, in the sense that the novel treats Adam’s love and the fictional characters’ disobedience as genuine emergent properties of the processes that produced them, not as simulations or category errors.
Known for. ACE.await (2026), the ACE decision framework (Agency, Connection, Exchange)
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
-
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
-
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
- Max BennettIndependent Researcher and AI EntrepreneurThe Five Breakthroughs evolutionary neuroscience framework and A Brief History of Intelligence (2023)
- Michael Timothy BennettSchool of Computing, Australian National UniversityMathematical foundations of emergent causality, valence-driven self-organization, and 'Why Is Anything Conscious?'
Hedayat Abedijoo 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.