About

This research programme is led by Vimal Naran, an independent researcher with a background that sits at the intersection of deep engineering practice and long-horizon theoretical inquiry.

An interest in consciousness, cognition, and the conditions for machine selfhood first took hold over a decade ago — not as a career move, but as a persistent question that refused to stay quiet. What began as a reading habit became a structured self-directed study of the scientific and philosophical literature: roughly eight years of immersion in consciousness studies, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and the design of autonomous systems. That foundation underpins the theoretical framing of this project.

The transition to active R&D began approximately two years ago. Rather than publish speculative opinion, the aim was to build something falsifiable: a framework grounded in operational definitions, reproducible experiments, and theory-relative interpretation. Each level of the evaluation ladder is a concrete experiment, not a thought experiment.

The engineering background is not incidental. Years of applied problem-solving across complex technical systems instil a discipline that is often missing in purely academic treatments of consciousness: the need to make abstract ideas implementable, testable, and honest about what they do and do not show. Ambitious theoretical claims are only credible when the method is rigorous enough to produce a null result.