The Radical Plasticity Thesis: How the Brain Learns to be Conscious - PMC

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Front Psychol<br>. 2011 May 9;2:86. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00086

The Radical Plasticity Thesis: How the Brain Learns to be Conscious

Axel Cleeremans<br>Axel Cleeremans

1Consciousness, Cognition and Computation Group, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium

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1,*

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1Consciousness, Cognition and Computation Group, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium

Edited by: Morten Overgaard, Aarhus University, Aarhus University Hospital, Denmark

Reviewed by: Hakwan C. Lau, Columbia University in the City of New York, USA; Zoltan Dienes, University of Sussex, UK

✉*Correspondence: Axel Cleeremans, Consciousness, Cognition and Computation Group, Université Libre de Bruxelles CP 191, 50 Avenue F.-D. Roosevelt, B1050 Bruxelles, Belgium. e-mail: axcleer@ulb.ac.be

This article was submitted to Frontiers in Consciousness Research, a specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.

Received 2010 Nov 19; Accepted 2011 Apr 26; Prepublished 2011 Feb 25; Collection date 2011.

Copyright © 2011 Cleeremans.

This is an open-access article subject to a non-exclusive license between the authors and Frontiers Media SA, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and other Frontiers conditions are complied with.

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PMCID: PMC3110382  PMID: 21687455

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the idea that consciousness is something that the brain learns to do rather than an intrinsic property of certain neural states and not others. Starting from the idea that neural activity is inherently unconscious, the question thus becomes: How does the brain learn to be conscious? I suggest that consciousness arises as a result of the brain's continuous attempts at predicting not only the consequences of its actions on the world and on other agents, but also the consequences of activity in one cerebral region on activity in other regions. By this account, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, so developing systems of meta-representations that characterize and qualify the target first-order representations. Such learned redescriptions, enriched by the emotional value associated with them, form the basis of conscious experience. Learning and plasticity are thus central to consciousness, to the extent that experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned to know they possess certain first-order states and that have learned to care more about certain states than about others. This is what I call the “Radical Plasticity Thesis.” In a sense thus, this is the enactive perspective, but turned both inwards and (further) outwards. Consciousness involves “signal detection on the mind”; the conscious mind is the brain's (non-conceptual, implicit) theory about itself. I illustrate these ideas through neural network models that simulate the relationships between performance and awareness in different tasks.

Keywords: consciousness, learning, subjective experience, neural networks, emotion

Consider the humble but proverbial thermostat. A thermostat is a simple device that can turn a furnace on or off depending on whether the current temperature exceeds a set threshold. Thus, the thermostat can appropriately be said to be sensitive to temperature. But is there some sense in which the thermostat can be characterized as being aware of temperature? Contra Chalmers (1996), I will argue that there is no sense in which the thermostat can be characterized as being aware of temperature. There are two important points that I would like to emphasize in developing this argument. The first is that there is no sense in which the thermostat can be characterized as being aware of temperature because it does not know that it is sensitive to temperature. The second point is that there is no sense in which the thermostat can be characterized as being aware of temperature because it does not care about whether its environment is hot or cold. I will further argue that these two features – knowledge of one's own internal states and the emotional value associated with such knowledge – are...