Axel Cleeremans

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

• Axel Cleeremans and the Radical Plasticity Thesis That the Brain Learns to Be Conscious August 2026

Elsewhere

• Homepage
• Google Scholar

Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.