The Opportunity
Understanding the nature of consciousness - what consciousness is and how it relates to physical systems - remains one of the deepest open questions in science.
Consciousness is central to all human experience. It underpins meaning in our lives and decision-making in our ethics. We all have different ideas - whether explicitly or implicitly - about what it is and what it means.
There’s no shortage of theories of consciousness - over 300 by some measures - but very few provide detailed accounts of how consciousness works at a mechanistic level. And there is precious little consensus regarding which theories are on track.
Why Now?
The science of fundamental consciousness has become critical to steering the future of civilization.
As humanity debates the consciousness of AI and animals, it becomes essential to understand what drives consciousness, not just to identify consciousness outside our species, but also to assess the nature of their experiences. Given the likelihood that any future AI consciousness would be profoundly different to our own, how will we know what brings it joy or causes it pain?
At the same time, recent adversarial collaborations have raised the bar for experimental progress in consciousness research and technology is accelerating in brain mapping, simulation, and intervention.
Our Approach
In late 2026, we will publish a Fundamental Consciousness Science report and a research map.
Our research will analyze a selection of major academic theories against a set of key questions, including:
- What the theory claims consciousness is
- What sustains the boundary between conscious and unconscious processing
- What indicators can be used for consciousness in animals or AI
- How it accounts for altered and transcendental states
- Potential for new experiments to meaningfully refine or test the theory
We will use the report to initiate a conversation with the community, exploring how we can catalyze the empirical and operational turn that the sector needs.
We’re interested in forecasting technology trajectories to understand when particular paradigm-shifting experiments might become viable, as well as opportunities to accelerate these trajectories and improve theorizing through AI and other relevant technologies.
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Impact
Advancing the study of fundamental consciousness could help:
- Coordinate field-wide funding around important avenues of research.
- Inspire and ground new approaches to areas like wellbeing, attention, and awakening.
- Bring more rigor to discussions of AI consciousness or animal consciousness.
- Shed light on one of humanity’s eternal questions and most intimate mysteries.
We’re actively shaping this program at the moment. If you have suggestions or ideas, feel free to share them to chris@cofo.org.