Materialism › Higher-Order
Armstrong’s Higher-Order Perception Theory
Consciousness as the Mind Perceiving Itself
David Armstrong proposes that a mental state becomes introspectively conscious when an ‘inner sense’ scans it, producing a perception-like awareness of that state. On his central-state materialism both the scanned state and the scanning are brain processes, so consciousness is a relational property a state gains by being monitored. Whether the scanner creates phenomenal feel or only makes an already felt state available to its subject remains disputed.
David Malet Armstrong, William Lycan
What consciousness is
Introspective consciousness is inner perception: one brain process scans another and produces non-inferential information about the subject’s current mental states.
Mind and body
All mental states are identical to brain states defined by their causal roles, and the inner scanner is one more such state, so consciousness adds nothing beyond the physical.
Mechanism
An inner sense modeled on outer perception: a first-order state causes a second-order, perception-like representation of it, without words, inference, or deliberate reflection.
Core claims
- The long-distance truck driver who ‘comes to’ after miles of competent driving shows perceptual consciousness without introspective consciousness.
- Inner perception is not exhaustive, not infallible, and only contingently private, which rejects the Cartesian transparent mind.
- Higher-order monitoring states need not be conscious themselves, which blocks an infinite regress.
- Because scanning is a physical process on physically realized states, consciousness fits within central-state materialism.
Criticisms
If the first-order state is already felt, the theory explains awareness of experience rather than experience itself; if not, Armstrong must explain how a second representation produces subjective character. Critics also raise misrepresentation by the scanner, animal and infant consciousness, and whether sub-personal monitoring can yield a unified first-person field.
Implications
- AI consciousness: Possible
- Since mental states are defined by causal role and inner sense is a monitoring function, a machine that scanned its own states in the right way would have introspective consciousness in principle.
- Survival beyond death: No
- All mental states, including inner scanning, are brain states, so they end with the brain.
- Meaning and purpose: Humanistic only
- An austere scientific materialism leaves no room for cosmic purpose.
- Virtual immortality: Possible
- If states are individuated by causal role, reproducing those roles and their self-monitoring in another system would in principle reproduce introspective consciousness.
Related theories
- Armstrong’s Causal-Role Central-State Materialism (Foundation)
- Rosenthal’s Higher-Order Thought (Contrast)
- Lycan's Homuncular Functionalism (Compatible)
- Carruthers’s First-Order Representationalism (Critique)
Sources
- A Materialist Theory of the Mind, David M. Armstrong (1968)
- Three Types of Consciousness, David M. Armstrong (1979)
- What Is Consciousness?, David M. Armstrong (1981)
- Consciousness and Causality: A Debate on the Nature of Mind, David M. Armstrong and N. Malcolm (1984)
- Consciousness and Experience, William G. Lycan (1996)
- Armstrong’s Just-So Story About Consciousness, D. Stoljar (2021)
- Armstrong's Materialist Theory of Mind, Peter R. Anstey and David Braddon-Mitchell (eds.) (2024)