Joscha Bach says the California Institute for Machine Consciousness project will investigate whether a self-organizing system can learn and develop phenomenology.

“I think I would, uh, hire a lot of people who are a lot smarter than me. At the moment, I started an, a smaller initiative. It's called the California Institute for Machine Consciousness, and I'm currently, uh, looking for people who are smarter than me who want to join me and, um, uh, to build a, a project in which we can look at the search space for consciousness, in which we can see, can we build a self-organizing system to learn, and is this thing, uh, going to develop phenomenology?”