Glossary

Amol Kelkar (kelkar.amol@gmail.com)

AI discussions often mix up two different things, capability and sentience. Here are the terms we use to keep them apart. See the capability–sentience gap for the argument that uses them.

The two axes

• Functional (access) consciousness. Information that is available across a system for reporting, reasoning and control. It is about behavior, and it can be measured, at least in principle. Large models have an alien form of it, limited to what is in their prompt (see the gap).
• Phenomenal consciousness. There is something it is like to be the system, i.e. subjective experience. It has not been shown for any current AI, and according to HTCC, scaling alone won’t produce it.
• Valence. How good or bad a state feels. According to HTCC, valence is the constitutive viability relation, and not an add-on.
• Sentience / machine sentience. The capacity for felt states, especially valenced ones. This is the phenomenal axis, and the one i3AI studies.

Self and awareness

• Self model. An internal representation a system maintains of itself. This is a functional notion; a system can have one without feeling anything.
• Self-awareness (functional). A system modeling and reporting on its own states. This is different from phenomenal self-awareness, i.e. there being something it is like to be that self.
• Sensory awareness (functional). Registering and acting on one’s own inputs. Functional, unless it comes with phenomenal experience.
• A self model that is its own implementation. A self that is re-instantiated by the same dynamics it reports on, so its states are felt and not just observed. This is the second of the two ingredients below.

Homeostasis and stake

• Homeostasis. Keeping internal variables within viable ranges. According to HTCC, it is the “outer loop” of everything brains do.
• Homeostatic stake / viability boundary. Something that is actually at risk for the system in its own persistence. Current LLMs don’t have one, and Pattern Machine builds it in.
• Cognitive homeostatic variable. A transient, made-up variable that a brain sets up and then regulates, as if it were a physiological variable. This is the mechanism behind goals and planning in Cognitive Homeostatic Agents.
• Two-ingredient test (for machine sentience). Felt valence requires both an intrinsic stake and a self model that is its own implementation.

Theory terms

• Illusionism (about phenomenal properties). The view that the phenomenal “feel” is the self model’s representation, with no further fact behind it. HTCC is illusionist about the feel, but realist about the stake.
• Constitutive viability relation. A system that has to stay within bounds to keep existing sets up its own norm. So “bad-for-it” is real, and it was never a phenomenal fact.
• Marginal rate of substitution (MRS) signature. HTCC’s falsifiable prediction: a stable, state-modulated exchange rate between cognitive and physiological drives that compete in one decision space. See Predictions.

Architecture terms

• Common cortical algorithm. The hypothesis that a single computation, repeated across the cortex, underlies its many different functions. Pattern Machine is our attempt at it.
• Pattern Machine. The core functional node: a spiking, temporally dynamic, locally learning substrate with homeostasis built in.
• Traveling waves. Activity moving across the cortical sheet. According to Pattern Machine, these are the replay of predicted trajectories.
• J-space / global workspace. In interpretability, an internal broadcast space for a model’s accessible thoughts (Anthropic, 2026). It is evidence of functional access, not of feelings. See the gap.