Uriah Kriegel
Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Uriah Kriegel is a research director at the Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS) whose 2009 Oxford book Subjective Consciousness, A Defensible Theory is the fullest development of self-representationalism. The theory holds that phenomenal character arises when a mental state represents itself, so consciousness is not a higher-order act on a first-order state, as in higher-order theories, but a feature of the first-order state’s own structure. The account is functionalist in the relevant sense, specifying a relational property a state can have on any substrate that implements it, which places Kriegel’s theory among the frameworks with computable machine verdicts on this site’s theory pages.
His broader program includes fine-grained taxonomies of the theory space, the metaphysics of phenomenal intentionality, and edited volumes that map the field’s disagreements with unusual care. That taxonomic work matters to the AI consciousness debate directly, since assessment programs inherit their rigor from the clarity of the theory space they sample.
Kriegel’s profile anchors the self-representationalist position in the site’s database, the position whose machine verdict, unlike some rivals’, can in principle be run on a system and checked.
Known for. Self-representationalism, Subjective Consciousness, the self-representational account of phenomenal character, fine-grained taxonomies of theories of consciousness
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Uriah Kriegel 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.