Consciousness Engineering

Consciousness is hypothesized to emerge from organized dynamical processes within a physical substrate, producing a continuous stream of experience that persists until interrupted. This stream can be described as a four-dimensional process-world-line: a trajectory through time that continues as long as the system remains powered, repairable, and dynamically stable. Physics does not require this trajectory to end; its termination is a biological contingency, driven by entropy accumulation, loss of repair capacity, and failure of the system’s control stability mechanisms. Death, on this view, is the collapse of a once-stable process rather than an inevitable event.

Conventional longevity approaches slow biological decline but do not actively stabilize the causal processes that sustain consciousness, leaving the trajectory inherently fragile. Emerging directions such as whole brain emulation (WBE) and neuromorphic or iontronic hardware raise the possibility of constructing de novo substrates capable of supporting more robust and repairable implementations of conscious dynamics. Whether continuity of the process-world-line can be preserved across such transitions remains an open, empirical question.

This Research Topic establishes consciousness engineering as a field dedicated to sustaining the causal dynamics that generate consciousness. Its purpose is to develop principles and protocols that prevent process collapse and preserve continuity across interventions and substrate transitions. Central aims include defining measurable criteria for processual continuity using control-theoretic and dynamical invariants, developing interventions that repair or replace failing causal structures, and engineering transitions to biomimetic or fully synthetic substrates without disrupting the causal chain of the process-world-line.

We welcome contributions spanning theory, modeling, and experiments, including demonstrations of continuity-preserving transitions, neural integration studies, and analyses that probe the physical and practical limits of process preservation, with the overarching goal of engineering consciousness continuity into a falsifiable, experimentally testable scientific target.

Submissions should be data-driven, falsifiable and empirically grounded. Areas of interest include:

• Thermodynamic and mathematical models of processual continuity and system stability

• Entropy-mitigation, repair protocols, and closed-loop controllers that prevent process collapse

• Design and characterization of synthetic substrates (neuromorphic, iontronic or other de novo architectures) with quantitative resilience metrics

• Continuity-preserving transitions, e.g. migration protocols specifying bandwidth, latency, noise, and integration windows

• Continuity biomarkers and perturb-and-measure assays, e.g. memory and metacognition probes, causal-topology verification

• Reliability, safety, and governance for continuity operations, including failure-mode analysis and continuity-of-service standards

Where feasible, authors should pre-register analyses, report explicit performance targets (e.g., latency, signal-to-noise ratios, stability bounds) and include safety and shutdown criteria. This Research Topic defines an interdisciplinary research program integrating neuroscience, materials engineering and physics to formalize a testable agenda for sustaining the conscious process through consciousness engineering.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Clinical Trial
• Community Case Study
• Conceptual Analysis
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Registered Report
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: consciousness, process-world-line, processual continuity, substrate resilience, entropy, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, neural repair, biohybrids, neuromorphic, causal topology, triboiontronic, consciousness engineering, synthetic consciousness mechanics, synconetics, iontronic, neuromimetic

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.