Plato's Primitives: We measure a common set of functions every conscious-style loop has to perform: sensing, attention, memory, expectation, error, value, and action. Tracked over time, they form what we call the subjective trajectory: an observable, transferable record of how a subject's experience evolves. We use Plato's allegory as a design frame; the only assumptions about the subject are that it remembers (thinks back), expects (thinks forward), and experiences (looks ahead).
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?
Five steps:
- Define the subject. Pin down the exact candidate — an inference pass, a training run, an agent loop, an organism. Different boundaries are different candidates and inherit none of each other's evidence.
- Get its run into the common format. Translate what the system actually did into the shared Episode fields: what it sensed, expected, got wrong, updated, valued, and did. For most candidates that means building the thing that produces those traces; a system that can't be made to emit them can't be scored.
- 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 it on the ladder. Report a level from C0 (no subject boundary) to C6 (low-rails embodied consciousness).
The full loop, every link of which has to be shown:
- World entry. An external event becomes present to the subject, distinct from being experienced.
- Attention/selection. Entry is gated by channel, salience, objective, or bottleneck rather than copied wholesale.
- Persistent state. What is admitted carries forward, so later steps depend on earlier ones.
- Expectation. Prior state generates a prediction before the next input arrives.
- Mismatch/surprise. The gap between expected and actual is measured in the subject's own terms.
- Online correction. That mismatch changes future state during the run, not after it.
- Value. Better/worse-for-the-subject biases what is retained, attended, or acted on.
- Action/exposure. State and value regulate how the subject couples to the world next.
- Accumulated trajectory. The run lays down a structured path: recurrence, basins, exits, gradients.
- Subject-owned cost. The work is paid by the subject and coupled to loss/pressure, not by rails or an outside optimizer.
- Matched-control survival. The whole pattern collapses when a required capacity is ablated, so it isn't an artifact.