Materialism › Higher-Order
Kriegel’s Cross-Order Self-Representation
Consciousness as an Experience That Represents Itself
Uriah Kriegel holds that a mental state is phenomenally conscious because it represents itself. The self-representation comes from functionally integrating a first-order representation of the world with a higher-order representation of that very state, forming one complex state. This places awareness of experience inside the experience and yields a testable neural hypothesis: consciousness requires integration between prefrontal and sensory populations.
Uriah Kriegel
What consciousness is
A phenomenally conscious state is a single complex representation that represents both an object in the world and itself, through cross-order integration of a first-order and a higher-order component.
Mind and body
Each component of the self-representing state has a neural realizer, and consciousness corresponds to a neural realizer of higher-order representation together with its integration with sensory representation.
Mechanism
Cross-order integration: the same binding that unifies color, shape, and location in a percept, applied across representational orders so that one state represents the world and itself.
Core claims
- A state can be ‘for me’ only if I am in some way aware of it, and that awareness is peripheral rather than attentive.
- Standard higher-order theories put the source of consciousness outside the conscious state and so cannot explain why that state acquires a subjective character of its own.
- Neural correlates should be derived from a theory of what consciousness is, which answers the ‘why question’ that purely correlational proposals leave open.
- The theory predicts that synchronization or comparable integration between prefrontal and sensory populations is required for consciousness.
Criticisms
Critics ask whether self-representation avoids circularity or only renames the regress problem. Gertler’s transparency objection holds that introspection reveals only the world, casting doubt on peripheral inner awareness, and Brogaard asks whether self-representation suffices for phenomenality at all.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Possible
- Since consciousness depends on a functional structure of integrated self-representation, a system that realized that structure would qualify in principle.
- Survival beyond death: No
- Conscious states are realized by integrated neural representations, so they cannot outlast the brain that realizes them.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- The theory is a naturalistic account of mental representation and implies no cosmic purpose.
- Virtual immortality: Possible
- If the integrated self-representing structure were reproduced in another substrate, the theory gives no principled reason the copy would lack consciousness.
Related theories
- Brentano’s Intentionality and Self-Awareness (Influence)
- Rosenthal’s Higher-Order Thought (Critique)
- Zahavi’s Pre-Reflective For-Me-Ness (Overlap)
- Ismael's Reflexive Representation and Situated Self (Contrast)
Sources
- The Same-Order Monitoring Theory of Consciousness, Uriah Kriegel (2006)
- Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness, Uriah Kriegel and K. Williford (eds.) (2006)
- A Cross-Order Integration Hypothesis for the Neural Correlate of Consciousness, Uriah Kriegel (2007)
- Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory, Uriah Kriegel (2009)
- For-Me-Ness: What It Is and What It Is Not, D. Zahavi and Uriah Kriegel (2016)
- Conscious States as Objects of Awareness, B. Gertler (2012)
- Are Conscious States Conscious in Virtue of Representing Themselves?, B. Brogaard (2012)