Ning, Huansheng & Ding, Jianguo: A Layered Model for AI Consciousness and Its Dialogue with Cybersophy

Is artificial intelligence capable of consciousness? Existing approaches proceed largely top-down, deriving necessary conditions from theories of consciousness and assessing whether AI systems satisfy them. This paper proposes a complementary, bottom-up tool: a layered model for evaluating AI consciousness that is explicitly grounded in the phenomenological tradition. The model comprises four layers: the Phenomenal layer (subjective qualia and affective valence, understood as intentional structu