What if consciousness evolved not to perceive the world but to survive in a world full of other minds? Paul Verschure proposes that the unified conscious scene solves a credit assignment problem created by parallel social simulations.

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In this episode, Paul Verschure is interviewed by Tony Prescott and Tim Pearce about his theory of consciousness and its relationship to his Distributed Adaptive Control (DAC) architecture. Verschure begins by surveying the landscape of consciousness research, identifying five families of necessary but insufficient conditions: embodied grounding (Metzinger, Damasio), sensorimotor coupling (O'Regan), predictive simulation (Hesslow), integration and differentiation (Tononi, Edelman), and global workspace dynamics (Baars, Dehaene). He ar ...