A Fort Wayne web developer and small business owner will present neuroscience research comparing decision-making in animal brains and AI models at the world’s longest-running consciousness conference this October, organized by the University of California San Diego.

Nathan M. Thornhill’s abstract, “The Internal Dynamics of Decisions: From rats and primates to AI,” cleared review by the scientific committee of The Science of Consciousness 2026. The international conference runs October 11 to 16 in San Diego and lists 315 posters across two evening sessions. Thornhill’s appears in Poster Session 1 on Tuesday, October 13. You can read his abstract here, which lists his affiliation as Fort Wayne, Indiana.

He ran a single analysis across neural recordings from rats and primates and across five large language AI models. Animals and AI models don’t land in the same regime, and what separates them shows up in the internal dynamics rather than in the output.

“Everybody has an opinion about whether AI is, or has the potential to be, conscious; almost nobody is measuring anything,” Thornhill said. “I went after the piece that can be measured. Two systems can reach the same answer by completely different routes, and scoring only the output tells you nothing about what produced it.”

Healthcare is where he started, patient-facing, before he taught himself computer programming. No computer science degree, no university appointment. He owns 3Rivers Enterprises LLC, which operates 3Rivers Web Tech, serving small businesses across northeast Indiana. In April he founded a second Indiana company, the Institute for Complexity Science and Advanced Computing, a Fort Wayne scholarly publisher that charges authors and researchers no fees to publish.

“The current scientific journal publishing model is broken. Science shouldn’t be gatekept and paywalled,” Thornhill said.

TechPoint readers may recognize the third piece. In July he launched CiteStamp, a free tool that checks whether the citations in a research paper actually exist. The underlying dataset went out as a free public tool, rather than staying proprietary.

Thornhill holds four provisional patents, published a 100-page scholarly paperback volume through the institute in June, and is finishing a degree in information technology. More at nathanthornhill.com.