Joy Bose — 2026
Building Consciousness
Buddhism, Neuroscience, and the Design of Sentient Machines
Consciousness is not computation. It is a temporally integrated, embodied, affectively grounded, self-organising process. Current AI systems fail at every one of these requirements. This book builds that argument from three directions: the phenomenological precision of Buddhist psychology (Abhidhamma, Madhyamaka, Dzogchen), the structural insights of contemporary neuroscience (predictive processing, integrated information, temporo-spatial dynamics), and the engineering constraints of AI. The result is a structural resonance map between what Buddhist first-person analysis has known for centuries, what neuroscience is discovering, and what any serious candidate for machine consciousness would actually need.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20536334 · Open access via Zenodo
- Part I — The Problem We Can't Ignore
- 1The Fact of Experience
- 2The Hard Problem and Its Escapes
- 3Why AI Forces the Question Now
- Part II — The Buddhist Deconstruction
- 4The Mind Without a Self (Abhidhamma)
- 5Emptiness and Dependent Origination
- 6Dzogchen and the Ground of Awareness
- Part III — The Scientific Models
- 7The Predictive Brain
- 8Binding, Time, and Conscious Unity
- 9Global Workspace, IIT, and Beyond
- 10Hawkins and Reference Frames
- Part IV — What Current AI Is (and Isn't)
- 11Inside Large Language Models
- 12Why ChatGPT Is Not Conscious
- Part V — Requirements for Consciousness
- 13Minimal Ingredients of a Conscious System
- 14The Three-Layer Self
- 15Measuring Consciousness
- Part VI — Designing Conscious Machines
- 16Why Spiking and Embodiment Matter
- 17A Candidate Architecture
- 18The Longchenpa Design
- 19Would It Be Conscious?
- Part VII — The Final Tension
- 20Can Awareness Be Built?
- 21The Middle Path
- Part VI — Designing Conscious Machines
- 22Building the First Conscious Prototype
- Part VII — The Final Tension
- 23What We Would Learn Either Way
Cite this book
@book{bose2026building,
title = {Building Consciousness: Buddhism, Neuroscience, and
the Design of Sentient Machines},
author = {Bose, Joy},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Zenodo},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.20536334},
url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20536334}
}