# Survey of Consciousness Theory from Computational Perspective

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10063/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 146 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Can Self-Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11610/) (2022)
- [PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18565/) (2023)
- [Evaluating and Inducing Personality in Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07550/) (2022)
- [Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08708/) (2023)
- [Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07103/) (2023)
- [Can ChatGPT Assess Human Personalities? A General Evaluation Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01248/) (2023)
- [CAT2000: A Large Scale Fixation Dataset for Boosting Saliency Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.03581/) (2015)
- [Estimating the Personality of White-Box Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12000/) (2022)
- [Identifying and Manipulating the Personality Traits of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10276/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models and the Reverse Turing Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.14382/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning and the Global Workspace Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.10390/) (2020)
- [A Theory of Consciousness from a Theoretical Computer Science Perspective: Insights from the Conscious Turing Machine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13704/) (2021)
- [Self-explaining AI as an alternative to interpretable AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05149/) (2020)
- [When the map is better than the territory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.09592/) (2016)
- [Human or Not? A Gamified Approach to the Turing Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20010/) (2023)
- [Brain in a Vat: On Missing Pieces Towards Artificial General Intelligence in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03762/) (2023)
- [What we are is more than what we do](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04219/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Exploring Consciousness in LLMs: A Systematic Survey of Theories, Implementations, and Frontier Risks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19806/) (2025)
- [Identifying Features that Shape Perceived Consciousness in Large Language Model-based AI: A Quantitative Study of Human Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15365/) (2025)
- [Toward IIT-Inspired Consciousness in LLMs: A Reward-Based Learning Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22786/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Human consciousness has been a long-lasting mystery for centuries, while machine intelligence and consciousness is an arduous pursuit. Researchers have developed diverse theories for interpreting the consciousness phenomenon in human brains from different perspectives and levels. This paper surveys several main branches of consciousness theories originating from different subjects including information theory, quantum physics, cognitive psychology, physiology and computer science, with the aim of bridging these theories from a computational perspective. It also discusses the existing evaluation metrics of consciousness and possibility for current computational models to be conscious. Breaking the mystery of consciousness can be an essential step in building general artificial intelligence with computing machines.