Abstraction and Resilience: the Characteristics of Consciousness

Consciousness isn't magic. It's engineered.

That's the starting premise of Abstraction and Resilience, a new framework that cuts through decades of philosophical deadlock to offer something both tractable and urgent: a way to measure how conscious any system - human, animal, or machine - actually is, and what moral weight should follow.

Chris Riley proposes a deceptively simple formula: C = A × R. Consciousness equals hierarchical abstraction - the capacity to build layered models of the worl...