Chris Frith
University College London
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at University College London, is one of the founders of cognitive neuroimaging and a central figure in the study of agency and self-awareness. His book Making Up the Mind, How the Brain Creates Our Mental World (Blackwell, 2007) argues that the brain is a hypothesis-testing machine whose experienced world is a model of its own making, and his experimental work on agency showed how the brain distinguishes self-caused from other-caused events, the distinction whose minimal implementation this site tracks in the spiking agent behavioral self analysis.
Frith is a co-author of the Butlin and Long indicator-properties report, this site’s nineteen researcher checklist, contributing the agency, metacognition, and social-cognition perspective to the indicator set. The collaboration’s higher-order and agency indicators descend from the research program he helped build, in which monitoring one’s own states and modeling other minds are two sides of one architecture.
His position defends the social and predictive character of experience. What a mind knows directly is its own model, and other minds are known through the same machinery. That thesis has aged into the mainstream of both consciousness science and machine self-model research, and this site’s coverage of introspective AI evidence rests on it.
Known for. Agency and the sense of self, Making Up the Mind, metacognition and awareness, indicator properties collaboration
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Patrick ButlinEleos AI Research. Previously the Global Priorities Institute, OxfordLead author of the indicator properties framework for assessing consciousness in AI systems
- Robert LongEleos AI Research (Executive Director)AI welfare research, the 14 indicator framework for AI consciousness assessment, the Eleos Conference on AI Consciousness and Welfare
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David ChalmersNew York University. Co-director, Center for Mind, Brain and ConsciousnessNaming the hard problem of consciousness, and the philosophical zombie argument
- Karl FristonUniversity College London. Chief Scientist, VERSES AIThe free energy principle and active inference
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Jonathan BirchLondon School of Economics and Political ScienceThe Edge of Sentience, the LSE Criteria, and the run-ahead principle
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Yoshua BengioMila, Université de MontréalThe Consciousness Prior, deep learning foundations, Turing Award, global workspace-inspired representation learning
Chris Frith is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.