Sushrut Thorat
Lossfunk
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Position on AI consciousness
Thorat's position is that a functionalist theory of consciousness must be built from a tested functional profile joined to an explanatory profile through abductive construction, candidate architectures implemented, intervened on, and revised, rather than asserted from first principles.
Sushrut Thorat is co-author of the full-stack functionalist theory programme at Lossfunk, whose first working paper was posted to arXiv on September 27, 2026. The paper’s contribution is a method before it is a result. For any content X and process Y, awareness of X changes something only if aware and unaware conditions differ while information about X is matched, and the paper demands performance matching, diagnostic dissociations, and non-monotonic effects before a comparison counts.
Applying that standard across the literature yields a deliberately small profile. Regulation of attentional influence is the strongest function, anchored by the 2006 Science finding that invisible motion distracts more than visible motion. Metacognitive evaluation is weaker but converging, with wager-accuracy correlations dissociated from performance in blindsight. Short-lived feature binding proceeds without awareness, the profile’s first boundary. The programme’s larger claim is structural. The functional profile and the explanatory profile, presentation structure, subject-world organisation, awareness judgments, problem reports, constrain theory construction from different directions, and bridging them requires abductive construction of candidate architectures, with Attention Schema Theory as the worked example and the bad-lot problem named as the method’s limit.
On this site’s taxonomy Thorat sits in the functionalist family, and the programme is the field’s most concrete functional-side entry into the AI consciousness assessment debate, supplying the matched-comparison discipline that indicator frameworks currently lack.
Known for. The full-stack functionalist theory of consciousness programme, the aware-unaware comparison method, the functional profile of awareness
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Paras ChopraLossfunk (founder)Founding the Lossfunk research lab, the full-stack functionalist theory of consciousness programme, writing on evolution and complexity at Lossfunc
- 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
Sushrut Thorat 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.