The radical plasticity thesis: How the brain learns to be conscious.
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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.
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Consciousness must be learned.
“This accords with the idea that consciousness must be learned (Cleeremans, 2011; Cleeremans et al., 2020; Lacalli, 2024a)”
From The function(s) of consciousness revisited: insights from a modular/constitutive model using vision as a test case (2026) · cites this paper as Cleeremans, 2011
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“Section 4 explores the learning task required if Cleeremans’ premise is correct, that consciousness must be learned (Cleeremans, 2011; Cleeremans et al., 2020) or, more precisely, that if conscious agency depends on a learning process, what that process is.”
Influential
- Authors
- Cleeremans, A.
- Affiliations
- Université Libre de Bruxelles (BE)
- Corresponding author
- Cleeremans, Axel
- ORCID
- Cleeremans, Axel
- Venue
- Frontiers in Psychology
- Publisher
- Frontiers Media SA
- Published
- 2011
- Volume
- 2
- Pages
- 86-86
- ISSN
- 1664-1078 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC3110382
- OpenAlex
- W2073051210
- Cited by
- 170
- References
- 69
- Citations by year
- 2026: 13 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 8 · 2023: 12 · 2022: 10 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 30 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 11 · 2017: 14 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 11 · 2014: 10 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 4
- FWCI
- 10.31
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Frontiers in Psychology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Dépôt institutionnel de l'Université libre de Bruxelles (Université Libre de Bruxelles) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Philosophy and Theoretical Science
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Embodied and Extended Cognition
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Cognitive Science and Education Research
- Keywords
- consciousness, neuroplasticity, learning, metarepresentation, prediction, self-representation, emotional value, neural network model
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