CONSC-BENCH asks one concrete question about any candidate system, from a model inference pass to a living organism:
Does it implement a bounded, self-maintaining conscious loop — or only imitate parts of one?
It runs in five steps:
- Name the boundary. Fix the exact candidate — an inference pass, a training run, an agent loop, an organism. Different boundaries are different candidates and do not inherit each other's evidence.
- Adapt to a common format. Map the run into shared Episode fields: what it sensed, expected, got wrong, updated, valued, and did.
- Score the loop. Rate five functional gates — Access, State, Model, Drive, Work — against five evidential tests — Present, Native, Live, Consequential, Controlled.
- Demand controls. A claimed function only counts when removing the capacity that should support it makes the function collapse.
- Place on the ladder. Report a level from C0 (no subject boundary) to C6 (low-rails embodied consciousness).
The loop being scored, in full — it has to be shown, not asserted:
world entry -> attention/selection -> persistent state -> expectation
-> mismatch/surprise -> online correction -> value -> action/exposure
-> accumulated trajectory -> subject-owned cost -> matched-control survival
Where the vocabulary comes from: the functional gates are drawn from Cave, a simulator that uses Plato's cave allegory as a design frame for the computational functions invoked in consciousness research — sensing, attention, memory, expectation, error, learning, value, action/exposure, and topology-like state.