Thore Graepel
Google DeepMind
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Position on AI consciousness
Graepel's stance is that strategic and computational analysis should underwrite claims about machine minds, and the framework he co-authored turns consciousness assessment into an explicit probabilistic computation over functional levels.
Thore Graepel’s research career has moved between computational game theory and large-scale machine learning. He co-invented QD Games and worked on the game-theoretic analysis of multi-agent systems, and as a research leader at Google DeepMind he has been part of the programme that turned reinforcement learning research into deployed systems. His methodological habit across that work is to state the strategy space explicitly before making claims about behaviour, and to prefer computations over assertions.
That habit is visible in the 2026 framework he co-authored with thirteen colleagues, From Cacophony to Hierarchy. The paper defines consciousness assessment as a computation with stated inputs, credences over five levels of functional description and 37 indicator activations with likelihood ratios, and a stated output, a credence-weighted probability. Graepel’s contribution sits in the tradition of treating assessment as an explicit inference problem rather than an exercise in expert judgement. On the site’s taxonomy the framework is functionalist in commitment, supervenience of experience on organisation, with substrate restrictions handled as constraints rather than assumptions.
Known for. Computational game theory and QD Games, DeepMind research leadership, co-author of the cacophony assessment framework
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Shamil ChandariaGoogle DeepMind Institute; University of Oxford; Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational PsychiatryFree energy principle and active inference, the Beautiful Loop theory, the Complex Brain Hypothesis, lead author of the From Cacophony to Hierarchy AI consciousness assessment framework
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Anil SethSussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of SussexThe beast machine hypothesis, and controlled hallucination as an account of perception
- Fernando E. RosasUniversity of Sussex, Imperial College London, University of Oxford, and PIBBSSCorresponding author of the BBS commentary on compatibilist emergence
- Murray ShanahanImperial College LondonGlobal workspace style cognitive architectures, Embodiment and the Inner Life, indicator properties for AI consciousness, LLM world models
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Chris FrithUniversity College LondonAgency and the sense of self, Making Up the Mind, metacognition and awareness, indicator properties collaboration
- Morten KringelbachDepartment of Psychiatry, University of Oxford; Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, Linacre College, Oxford; Department of Clinical Medicine, Aarhus UniversityWhole-brain computational modeling of non-equilibrium brain dynamics, the thermodynamics of mind framework, hedonic and pleasure circuitry
Thore Graepel 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.