Reasoning about conscious experience with axiomatic and graphical mathematics
This work addresses the challenge of scientifically studying consciousness, but it is incremental as it builds on existing mathematical frameworks without new empirical data.
The authors tackled the problem of formalizing consciousness by using axiomatic mathematics and graphical calculus from general process theories, resulting in a toy example that recovers features like subjective distinction, privacy, and phenomenal unity.
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.