Hakwan Lau
RIKEN Center for Brain Science / Laboratory for Consciousness
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Hakwan Lau is Team Leader at the RIKEN Center for Brain Science in Japan and former Professor of Psychology at UCLA and the University of Hong Kong. He is a prominent cognitive neuroscientist specializing in higher-order theories (HOT) of consciousness, metacognition, and perceptual awareness.
In In Consciousness We Trust, The Cognitive Neuroscience of Subjective Experience (Oxford University Press, 2022), Lau developed the Perceptual Reality Monitoring theory. He argues that subjective experience is generated when higher-order metacognitive circuits (primarily in the prefrontal and frontopolar cortex) evaluate first-order sensory signals to determine whether they represent genuine environmental stimuli or internal noise and simulations.
Lau’s empirical framework provides clear, operational criteria for machine systems. Artificial consciousness requires specific metacognitive reality-monitoring architectures capable of evaluating the statistical validity and noise profiles of the network’s own latent representations.
Known for. Perceptual Reality Monitoring, Higher-Order Neuroscientific Theories of Consciousness, In Consciousness We Trust (Oxford University Press, 2022)
Coverage on this site
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Hakwan Lau 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.