Reasoning about conscious experience with axiomatic and graphical mathematics

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel axiomatic and graphical mathematical framework to model and analyze various aspects of conscious experience, leveraging process theories and compositional structures.

Contribution

It presents a new approach using graphical calculus of process theories to formalize and recover features of consciousness like subjectivity, privacy, and unity.

Findings

Successfully models subjective distinctions and privacy.

Demonstrates the power of axiomatic calculus in capturing consciousness features.

Shows natural emergence of consciousness aspects from compositional structures.

Abstract

We cast aspects of consciousness in axiomatic mathematical terms, using the graphical calculus of general process theories (a.k.a symmetric monoidal categories and Frobenius algebras therein). This calculus exploits the ontological neutrality of process theories. A toy example using the axiomatic calculus is given to show the power of this approach, recovering other aspects of conscious experience, such as external and internal subjective distinction, privacy or unreadability of personal subjective experience, and phenomenal unity, one of the main issues for scientific studies of consciousness. In fact, these features naturally arise from the compositional nature of axiomatic calculus.