Jesse Prinz
CUNY Graduate Center
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Jesse Prinz, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, defends one of the most clearly specified functionalist theories of consciousness. His 2012 book The Conscious Brain argues that conscious experience is attended intermediate-level representation, AIR, the product of attention operating on mid-level sensory representations, with emotion supplying the valence that makes states conscious in the full sense. The theory is a real rival to global workspace and higher-order accounts, and its precision is the point. It names the representational level and the operation, so its verdict on any candidate system, biological or artificial, can be stated.
Prinz’s broader program spans emotion, moral psychology, and the empirical philosophy of mind, and his methodological stance runs through all of it, that philosophy of consciousness should be continuous with cognitive science rather than floating above it. That stance aligns him with the theory-heavy assessment method this site tracks in the nineteen researcher checklist.
For AI consciousness, the AIR theory’s verdict is conditional and computable in principle. A machine implementing attended intermediate-level representations would satisfy the theory’s conditions, which makes Prinz’s account one of the frameworks whose machine implications the site’s theory pages map.
Known for. The AIR theory of consciousness, attended intermediate-level representations, emotion and moral psychology, the conscious brain as a functional workspace of the senses
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Jesse Prinz 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.