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The Conscious Turing Machine (CTM) is inspired by Alan Turing’s simple yet powerful model of computation and Bernard Baars’ theater model of consciousness. As in TCS, resource limitations are taken into account. Though extremely simple, the model (1) aligns at a high level with many of the major scientific theories of human and animal consciousness, (2) provides explanations at a high level for many phenomena associated with consciousness, (3) gives insight into how a machine can have subjective consciousness, and (4) is clearly buildable. This combination supports our claim that machine consciousness is not only plausible but inevitable.

We define the Conscious Turing Machine (CTM), a formal global workspace model of consciousness specified as a 7-tuple. Its 10 million processors self-define a multimodal language, Brainish, together with a dictionary of chunks. Each chunk is a 5-tuple that contains and defines a 2-tuple Brainish word.

Our principal contribution is not theorems—though there is one—but theoretical insights into several central puzzles of consciousness. From this formal definition follow a proposed solution to the binding problem, an explanation of how the suffering of pain is generated, and testable predictions derived from the CTM.