Matthias Michel
Matthias Michel works at the intersection of philosophy of mind and the experimental methodology of consciousness research, with a long-standing focus on overflow, the disputed claim that conscious perceptual experience contains more detail than a subject can report. That methodological attention to what evidence can and cannot establish carries into his collaboration with Stephen Fleming on the sensory horizons account of conscious vision, published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, which argues that conscious vision is too slow to serve real-time action and instead evolved to support offline planning after the water-to-land transition expanded the visual range available to terrestrial animals.
Michel’s contribution to that programme sits on the reality monitoring side of the argument, the question of how a system tells apart signals generated by the world from signals generated internally, a distinction the paper treats as functionally tied to why conscious vision exists at all. Their 2026 response to commentaries defended and extended the account against objections about its generality across sensory modalities and non-terrestrial animals.
No freely licensed photograph of the philosopher Matthias Michel is available on Wikimedia Commons. A separate Wikipedia article titled “Matthias Michel” exists for a Swiss politician and is not the same person; that article’s photograph is not used here. Checked 2026-08-20.
Known for. Philosophy of perception and co-author of the sensory horizons account of conscious vision
Coverage on this site
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.