Chetan Prakash

Chetan Prakash is a mathematician and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at California State University, San Bernardino, where he taught from 1984 to 2018. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Physics from the University of Delhi and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University. Before joining CSUSB, he held positions at UC Irvine, where his long collaboration with Donald Hoffman began.

Prakash co-developed the Conscious Agents framework with Hoffman: a formal mathematical theory that models perception and cognition using measurable spaces for conscious experiences and Markov kernels for probabilistic interactions among agents. The framework provides a rigorous account of how networks of conscious observers could generate the structures that physics describes as spacetime and physical objects. He is co-author of Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory of Perception (Academic Press, 1989), a foundational text in the mathematical study of perception, and has presented at the Models of Consciousness conference at the University of Oxford.

At the Trace Institute, Prakash serves as a Senior Researcher. His view is that the problem of consciousness has resisted progress not for lack of philosophical attention but for lack of the right mathematics. The Conscious Agents framework is an attempt to supply exactly that: a formal language in which the observer can be placed at the foundations of science without sacrificing rigor.