Janusz A. Starzyk
Institutional affiliation not stated on the arXiv record
Janusz Starzyk is the submitting author of the three-paper 2026 MEM programme with Wieslaw Galus, and the senior partner in the collaboration by submission record. The programme’s position runs against the current of AI consciousness discussion that grades systems on language and task performance. The September 2026 paper states the negative list plainly, that linguistic ability, multimodality, memory, planning, action control, and humanoid embodiment are not sufficient evidence of phenomenal experience, and builds the positive alternative from biological precursors whose counterparts the authors argue may be engineered.
The positive alternative is the Motivated Emotional Mind. Its central definition makes the position concrete, a phenomenal state as a dynamic, integrated state of the whole embodied system in which sensor-grounded modal content is recurrently stabilized and coupled to a suprathreshold interoceptive representation of the system’s regulatory state. That definition places the programme’s weight on interoception and allostasis rather than on workspace access or integrated information, and it connects the machine-consciousness question back to the biological ground the affective neuroscience tradition works from.
Starzyk does not carry a single position label on this site. The MEM programme is a hybrid, embodied and homeostatic in its grounding, functionalist in its claim that the needed counterparts may be engineered, and explicitly hypothesis-stage in its own assessment, which is why the three papers present it as a falsifiable research program requiring empirical validation and ethical caution rather than as a settled theory.
Known for. The Motivated Emotional Mind architecture, embodied machine consciousness research, the three-paper 2026 programme with Wieslaw Galus
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