Consciousness as a Jamming Phase
Kaichen Ouyang

TL;DR
This paper proposes a physical framework modeling consciousness emergence in neural networks as a jamming phase transition, linking it to critical phenomena observed in disordered systems and providing a unified explanation for AI scaling laws.
Contribution
It introduces a neural jamming phase diagram that interprets consciousness emergence as a critical jamming transition, connecting AI behavior with physical jamming phenomena.
Findings
Identification of three control parameters: temperature, volume fraction, stress.
Demonstration of shared critical signatures between jamming and consciousness emergence.
Unified physical explanation for AI scaling laws and consciousness phenomena.
Abstract
This paper develops a neural jamming phase diagram that interprets the emergence of consciousness in large language models as a critical phenomenon in high-dimensional disordered systems.By establishing analogies with jamming transitions in granular matter and other complex systems, we identify three fundamental control parameters governing the phase behavior of neural networks: temperature, volume fraction, and stress.The theory provides a unified physical explanation for empirical scaling laws in artificial intelligence, demonstrating how computational cooling, density optimization, and noise reduction collectively drive systems toward a critical jamming surface where generalized intelligence emerges. Remarkably, the same thermodynamic principles that describe conventional jamming transitions appear to underlie the emergence of consciousness in neural networks, evidenced by shared…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNeural Networks and Reservoir Computing · Quantum many-body systems · Embodied and Extended Cognition
