Axel Cleeremans
Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Axel Cleeremans is Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Center for Research in Cognition and Neurosciences at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), as well as a Research Director at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). He is a past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC).
Cleeremans is the author of the Radical Plasticity Thesis of consciousness. In papers such as “The Radical Plasticity Thesis, How the Brain Learns to be Conscious” (2011) and The Computational Self, he argues that consciousness is an active, learned process developed through continuous self-observation. The brain continuously observes its own internal activity and develops implicit second-order metarepresentations that predict and redescribe first-order sensory states.
Under Cleeremans’s paradigm, machine consciousness is fully achievable through artificial neural networks, provided the architecture incorporates self-supervised metarepresentation mechanisms that continuously learn and model the system’s own latent representations.
Known for. Radical Plasticity Thesis of Consciousness, The Computational Self, metarepresentation learning, Implicit Learning
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
-
Blaise Agüera y ArcasGoogle VP and Fellow, CTO of Technology & SocietyComputational functionalism, active inference, on-device neural computing, What Is Intelligence? (2025), and Who Are We Now? (2023)
- Igor AleksanderImperial College LondonAxiomatic Consciousness Theory, neural state machines, The World in My Mind, pioneering neural network engineering
-
Joscha BachCalifornia Institute for Machine ConsciousnessThe machine consciousness hypothesis, cyber animism, and MicroPsi
- Talis BachmannUniversity of TartuAttention-awareness theory, the preactivation hypothesis for conscious perception, masking and the microgenesis of awareness, perception without awareness
- Max BennettIndependent Researcher and AI EntrepreneurThe Five Breakthroughs evolutionary neuroscience framework and A Brief History of Intelligence (2023)
- Michael Timothy BennettSchool of Computing, Australian National UniversityMathematical foundations of emergent causality, valence-driven self-organization, and 'Why Is Anything Conscious?'
Axel Cleeremans 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.