Synthetic Consciousness: Robot/Ball/Box world
I built a Java simulation of Igor Aleksander's Five Axioms of Synthetic Consciousness and made a video of it - here's what it actually does and why it matters
I have been reading Aleksander's work for a while and wanted to see whether his five axioms could be implemented as a genuinely coherent system rather than just described theoretically. The short answer is yes, and the result is more interesting than I expected.
For those unfamiliar, Igor Aleksander was Professor of Neural Systems Engineering at Imperial College London. He spent his career asking what a machine would actually need in order to be conscious - not intelligent in the narrow benchmark sense, but genuinely aware of itself and its world. His answer, developed over decades and described in books including Impossible Minds and My Neurons, My Consciousness, was a set of five axioms he argued are both necessary and sufficient for synthetic consciousness to arise.
He was not a fringe figure. He was mainstream academic, rigorous, and deeply engaged with both the philosophy of mind and the engineering of real systems. He died in 2019 and I think his work deserves considerably more attention than it currently gets in discussions like the ones on this subreddit.