Xin Huang is a graduate researcher in the integrated master’s–PhD program in Philosophy of Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, and a winner of the 2025 Berggruen Prize Essay Competition

In his winning essay, Xin Huang uses the “token” to reopen the consciousness problem in the age of intelligent systems: when experience and intention are encoded as computable objects, do we obtain consciousness itself, or a more manageable substitute? The essay then examines the ambition of the “unified token,” an enticing blueprint for bridging language, computation, and mind, yet one that may ultimately amount to an engineering-level compromise and alignment. It further proposes the brain-computer interface (BCI) as a new route into consciousness research, suggesting that once intention, feeling, and action are translated into operable tokens, the problem of consciousness can be reframed and tested in new ways.

The jury highly praised Xin Huang’s essay, recognizing it as a rigorous, original, and philosophically sophisticated analysis that elucidates the deep conceptual connections among language, consciousness, and computation in the age of artificial intelligence. Xinyi Fu, Professor of Philosophy at Fudan University, emphasized that the paper offers a clear and forceful distinction between the engineering-level functions of tokens and deeper semantic structures, convincingly arguing that the true significance of tokens lies not in constituting a unified world language, but in their role as dynamic and translatable interfaces. Jianhua Mei, Professor of Philosophy at Shanxi University, highlighted the essay’s originality and theoretical depth, commending its construction of a unified “token theory” and its proposal of a novel criterion for assessing artificial consciousness based on token reconstruction and conceptual induction, which he regarded as a contribution of distinctive academic value. Zhihua Yao, Professor of Philosophy at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, described the paper as measured, insightful, and innovative, noting its development of the token concept into a general interface mechanism and emphasizing how its discussion of “distributed tokenization” offers an illuminating perspective on artificial intelligence and brain–computer interfaces. Taken together, the jury agreed that the essay makes a clear, profound, and critically constructive contribution to contemporary debates on language, consciousness, and intelligent machines.

Essay Abstract
This paper takes the concept of token in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) as a starting point to examine the relationship between language, consciousness, and computation. In AI, statistical modeling discretizes natural language into computable units, thereby exhibiting generative capacity; in BCI, continuous neural signals are segmented into representational tokens of intention, enabling externalization and parallel selection. Although differing in mechanism, both rely on tokens to compress complexity. However, this similarity remains confined to the engineering level rather than indicating semantic isomorphism. The meaning of tokens is always dependent on context and networks of difference, and their generation is shaped by algorithms, experimental conditions, and cultural settings. Accordingly, this paper clarifies why a “unified token” is untenable, emphasizing instead its value as an operational interface across systems; it proposes the autonomous generation and stable use of “new concept tokens” as a criterion for machine consciousness; and it reveals how BCI, understood as a decentralized interface network, provides a new interpretation of mind-body interaction.

Readers can now find Xin Huang‘s full essay published in Cuiling.