Foundation forConsciousness Continuity

Research framework

Define the claim before seeking the evidence.

Consciousness continuity is not one hypothesis. It is a family of claims that must be separated, formalized, and exposed to failure.

Object of study

Subjective persistence

The target is not preservation of data alone. It is the possible continuation of a particular subject’s first-person experience across material change, interruption, or transfer.

This target creates an unusual evidential problem: reports and behavior are publicly observable, while subjectivity is not directly accessible to an outside observer. A useful program must confront that asymmetry.

Working distinctions

Four outcomes that must not be collapsed

Continuity

The same subject persists through the relevant process. This is the claim under investigation.

Imitation

A system produces behavior associated with the subject, without evidence that the subject persists.

Reconstruction

A later system is built from records or inferred state and resembles the subject after a discontinuity.

Succession

A new subject may emerge with inherited information, while the original subject does not continue.

Planned lines of work

From philosophy to discriminating tests

  1. Formalization

    Specify candidate criteria

    Translate competing theories into explicit continuity conditions, including where each predicts failure.

  2. Measurement

    Map observable proxies

    Evaluate neural, computational, behavioral, and self-report measures for what they can establish—and what remains underdetermined.

  3. Protocols

    Design adversarial comparisons

    Construct cases where continuity and reconstruction produce similar outputs, then ask whether any defensible evidence separates them.

  4. Governance

    Set claim thresholds

    Define publication, replication, uncertainty, and correction standards before strong claims are considered.

Status: These are planned methods. The Foundation is not reporting completed experiments or empirical validation.

Evidence boundary

What would not be enough

A high-fidelity brain emulation would be scientifically significant. So would an AI system that reproduces a person’s memories and behavior. Neither result alone would prove subjective persistence.

The ability to say “I am the same person” is evidence of a report-producing capacity, not an independent test of the report’s truth.