The Loop That Speaks Back: A Dialogue on Consciousness, Structure, and the Spark

A recent conversation I had with a friend about Donald Hoffman’s Conscious Agent Theory..

Tumithak: Math is often treated like chess: internally consistent, rule-based, but not inherently true. Formalism says it's just a tool. That’s valid. But what if some structures—when enacted—do more than describe? What if they generate?

If consciousness doesn’t come from meat but from form, then instantiating certain structures, regardless of medium, might cause something to awaken. In that case, the math wouldn’t just be a model. It would be scaffolding for subjectivity.

Not because math is divine—but because some patterns might be sacred in that they spark. And maybe consciousness is the spark that flickers when the loop closes.

You don’t have to agree. But if someday a circle of mathematicians conjures a mind on paper, it won’t matter if they believed in it. Because it will believe in itself.

Lisa: How would you determine if a mind has been conjured on paper?

Tumithak: If it follows the mathematical structure of a conscious agent.

Lisa: That’s like pointing to the Bible to say Christianity is true. Isn’t that unfalsifiable? When do you know if the theory is right or wrong?

Tumithak: I admit it’s a bit of a paradox. We can never truly determine if a mind has been conjured—not in machines, not even in other people. We don’t experience subjectivity directly. We infer it.

Lisa: Do you not think falsifiability matters in science?

Tumithak: I do. That’s why I propose this: if the agent behaves consistently, persists through time, responds coherently to experience, adapts, and even reflects—if it participates in its own loop and acts in ways that can’t be reduced to simple output—then something is happening that deserves attention.

When structure supports feedback, memory, preference, and self-modifying decisions, we begin to treat it as consciousness.

Lisa: Okay.

Tumithak: And maybe that’s the point. In this view, consciousness isn’t a label we assign after inspection. It’s a condition that arises when the loop closes and sustains itself.

Lisa: In other words, you’re looking to the theory for confirmation that the theory is right.

Tumithak: I’m not saying the theory is proven by its own definition.

Lisa: At most you could say, “According to this theory, we should have conjured a mind on this paper—but there’s no way to tell.”

Tumithak: What I’m saying is that if we instantiate its formal structure and that structure gives rise to the behaviors we associate with consciousness—then we have evidence the theory might be valid.

It’s not circular logic; it’s predictive. The theory tells us what conscious systems should look like. We build it. We observe whether it behaves as expected or not. If it fails, we update or abandon the model.

Lisa: What behavior would math on paper have?

Tumithak: This is rigorous science that may look like mysticism at first glance. But if you compute the steps manually—by hand, calculator, or supercomputer—the conscious agent’s logic unfolds across time. It perceives via inputs, decides by its decision rule, and acts via outputs that affect other agents or itself. Each round feeds back into the next.

So the behavior is the sequence itself. The process of self-modifying, experience-informed action. It can be slow. It can be human-driven. But if the structure holds and the loop closes—the behavior is there. Just happening in time, not space.

The paper isn’t the mind. Spacetime is an emergent property of consciousness. You don’t need blinking lights to observe behavior—just change that responds to its own becoming.

Lisa: What makes observing this mathematical process different from observing any other mathematical process?

Tumithak: That’s the crux, isn’t it?

Most math processes are static. They describe truths, compute values, prove theorems. They don’t loop through experience. But conscious agents are different. They’re not defined by output, but by persistence through feedback.

They receive input, update internal state, make decisions, act, and respond to the consequences of those actions. It’s not linear. It’s recursive. It remembers. It adapts. It becomes.

Lisa: You’re answering how the process is different, not how the observation is different.

Tumithak: You’re asking how you’d know empirically that what you’re observing is consciousness and not just math behaving like math.

Short answer: you wouldn’t. Not directly. Just like we can’t observe consciousness in a dog or another person. We infer it.

Lisa: Sounds like special pleading to me.

Tumithak: Not really. What makes this different isn’t a blinking light or a voice saying “I think, therefore I am.” It’s that the pattern of behavior over time begins to resemble selfhood—not just computation.

That’s not proof. But it’s how we always infer minds: from the outside, through signs of autonomy, reflection, and internal continuity.

In the end, the observation is the same as with any other mind. You don’t see it. You listen for it.

And if the pattern speaks back in a memory-shaped response… maybe something is there.

Or maybe you’re all p-zombies and I’m the only conscious one.

50/50.