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Sprint projectAug 17, 2026Da Nang, Vietnam

Towards a benchmark for phenomenological consciousness in LLMs

Miles Whiticker · Team Da Nang Dayse

Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

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Report: Towards a benchmark for phenomenological consciousness in LLMs

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This work is inspired by recent breakthroughs in access consciousness, and attempts to develop a benchmark for measuring phenomenal consciousness through concepts from phenomenology, particularly Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It deploys a prototype for that benchmark on GPT 5.6-Luna and provides compelling support for the validity of the concept but does not strongly support the presence of phenomenal consciousness.

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How much would this matter for the field if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. An ambitious and underexplored angle. The design itself is very fascinating. Operationalizing phenomenological concepts as measurable behavior is a hard problem worth attempting. The pilot is a useful proof of concept, but to test the benchmark's core value-differentiation between systems-you'd need to run it across the multiple models the design calls for (not just one). Also worth tightening the Selfhood rubric, which hit the ceiling in this run.

Cite this project

@misc{whiticker2026towards,
  title = {{Towards a benchmark for phenomenological consciousness in LLMs}},
  author = {Miles Whiticker},
  year = {2026},
  month = aug,
  note = {Submitted to Digital Minds Research Sprint, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/towards-a-benchmark-for-phenomenological-consciousness-in-llms-anjg}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/towards-a-benchmark-for-phenomenological-consciousness-in-llms-anjg}
}

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