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About

Xerxes D. Arsiwalla is a researcher working at the intersection of consciousness science, artificial intelligence, and cognitive robotics. His most influential work centers on understanding and formalizing the nature of consciousness across biological and artificial systems. His landmark contribution, "The Morphospace of Consciousness" — developed across formulations in 2017 and 2023 — introduces an information-theoretic framework that maps different forms of mind along axes of autonomic, computational, and integrative complexity, offering a principled way to compare human cognition with AI systems. This work has garnered over 27 citations and has helped bridge clinical scales of consciousness with theoretical models applicable to machine intelligence. Beyond consciousness mapping, Arsiwalla has made notable contributions to machine ethics, exploring harm-avoidance and cooperative behavior in human-robot interaction, and to social cognition in synthetic agents. His work on Theory of Mind in robots — developing methods for agents to distinguish self from other through sensorimotor feedback — pushes the boundaries of cognitively sophisticated AI. Collectively, his research addresses some of the deepest questions in cognitive science: what it means to be conscious, how machines might approach moral reasoning, and how artificial agents can develop genuinely social intelligence.