Jonathan Schooler
University of California, Santa Barbara
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Jonathan Schooler PhD is a Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He earned his PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Washington and has held faculty positions at the University of Pittsburgh and UC Santa Barbara.
Schooler’s research focuses on metawareness, the ability to be aware of one’s own mental states, and its relationship to attention, mind-wandering, and conscious experience. His work on meta-cognition has direct relevance to the functionalist approach to consciousness, particularly for evaluating whether artificial systems can develop self-models and self-awareness.
He is a speaker at Consciousness Science 2026 (CS26) in San Diego, where his findings on how humans monitor their own cognitive processes inform the criteria for consciousness in both biological and artificial systems.
Known for. Metawareness, meta-cognition, mind-wandering, consciousness and attention
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Jonathan Schooler 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.