The Giants Shoulder #100 Meet The Scientist Who Wrote the Blueprint for Conscious Machines
Mar 5, 2026
Dr. Michael Timothy Bennett, a computer scientist at Australian National University who wrote the thesis How to Build Conscious Machines, outlines a mathematical blueprint linking information processing to experience. He discusses how layers of selfhood and valuation create feeling. Short, punchy takes cover bioelectric signaling, liquid versus solid brains, cancer as breakdown of cellular cooperation, and what architectures might actually produce conscious machines.
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Liquid Brains Need Solid Substrates
- Cognition can be liquid (ant-colony style) or solid (persistent bioelectric structure) and both depend on supporting abstraction layers.
- Liquid systems (ants, human groups) need an underlying stable substrate to persist and compute effectively.
Grow Hybrids By Extending Control And Feedback
- Extend human hybrid systems by increasing direct control and feedback to lower layers to grow prosthetic and cooperative hybrids.
- Use brain-computer integration and richer feedback loops to expand size and alignment of integrated hybrids.
Assume An Infinite Stack To Find Invariants
- Treating the abstraction stack as potentially infinite avoids regress by identifying invariants that must hold regardless of the bottom.
- Change/difference is the necessary base: without it there's no distinguishable objects or meaning.