Naotsugu Tsuchiya
Naotsugu Tsuchiya runs a consciousness science laboratory at Monash University that sits between empirical neuroscience and formal theory. His research programme tests predictions of Integrated Information Theory and adjacent structural approaches against EEG and fMRI data while also pursuing a more abstract question, how far a mathematical description of one system’s experience can be used to say anything about another’s.
That question is the subject of “The Rosetta Stone and Levels of Principled Inference to the Experience of Another Mind,” a 2026 paper with Kallum Robinson, Giulio Tononi, and Matteo Grasso. The paper compares two structural approaches, the Qualia Structure Paradigm, which describes an experience by its relations to every other possible experience, and Integrated Information Theory, which describes an experience by the internal causal structure that specifies it. Using category theory, the authors formalize discrete levels of correspondence between two systems’ experiential structures, from full isomorphism down through strong and weak adjunction to a principled limit past which no further inference is possible. Neither framework closes what the paper calls the acquaintance gap, direct access to what it is like to be the other system, but both let researchers state exactly how much structural correspondence has or has not been established.
The result bears directly on any claim that an AI system’s internal representations resemble human experience. Tsuchiya’s collaboration treats resemblance claims as gradable and falsifiable rather than binary, meaning a claim like “this model represents color similarity structurally like humans do” can be assigned a specific inferential grade, isomorphism, adjunction, or nothing provable at all, instead of being accepted or dismissed wholesale.
No freely licensed photograph of Naotsugu Tsuchiya is available on Wikimedia Commons; his Wikipedia article carries no page image. Checked 2026-08-20.
Known for. Formal and mathematical approaches to the structure of conscious experience
Coverage on this site
Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.