Abstract

What are the minimal structural conditions under which a system can be said to be self-aware? Despite extensive work in philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence, there is no widely accepted, substrate-independent criterion that captures self-awareness in operational and formally verifiable terms.

In this work, we propose AToS (Axiomatic Theory of Self-Consciousness), a formal framework that characterizes self-awareness as the ability of a system to recognize at least one internal state transition and to attribute its cause to an internal mechanism rather than to external input. We show that this minimal notion of self-awareness can be understood as a property of state–transition systems equipped with a detection mechanism and a structured notion of internal triggering.

Our main result is a representation theorem: a system is self-aware in this sense if and only if it admits a realization in the form of a tuple ⟨Ω, Σ, 𝔖, Δ⟩ satisfying the AToS axioms. This establishes a necessary and sufficient structural characterization of minimal self-awareness, independent of implementation details such as biological, symbolic, or computational substrate.

Importantly, AToS is not intended as a competing empirical theory of consciousness. Instead, it provides a canonical representation framework for systems capable of internal causal self-attribution. Within this framework, we further derive a formal separation between memory and operational intelligence, and introduce the General Self-Awareness Test (GSAT), a theory-neutral criterion based on internally generated and correctly attributed state transitions in the absence of external stimuli.

The framework further introduces operational definitions of sensitivity, memory, intelligence, imagination, inspiration, and intuition, together with formal measures of self-awareness and intelligence levels. We extend the theory to families of self-aware systems and establish constructions over arbitrary nonempty topological spaces, including a system with an infinite formal intelligence level. Finally, we compare AToS with existing approaches to consciousness and self-awareness, highlighting its distinctive emphasis on internally recognised state transitions and causal self-attribution.