Cleeremans and Tallon-Baudry’s Functional Value
Cleeremans and Tallon-Baudry propose that “subject-level experience—‘What it feels like’—is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why they do certain things and avoid others.”
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Axel Cleeremans
Cognitive Psychologist
Axel Cleeremans is a Belgian cognitive psychologist, professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles, and research director of Belgium’s F.R.S.–FNRS. Trained at Carnegie Mellon University under James McClelland, he became prominent for computational and experimental studies of implicit learning, unconscious cognition, metacognition, and consciousness. His Radical Plasticity Thesis proposes that consciousness emerges as the brain learns higher-order representations of its own activity. Cleeremans has also held major leadership roles in international consciousness and cognitive-science organizations. He co-edited the Oxford Companion to Consciousness.
Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Senior Researcher, Neurophysiology
Catherine Tallon-Baudry is a CNRS senior researcher and group leader working at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris. She is an electrophysiologist working on visual consciousness and brain body interactions. Her recent work focuses on the relationship between signals arising in the viscera, brain dynamics, and cognition.
Key Takeaways
Core Claim
Conscious experiences have intrinsic value that guides behavior and decision-making.
How It Works
We act based on how experiences feel; consciousness serves as a kind of “mental currency.”
Distinguishing Idea
Consciousness evolved because it adds value-based flexibility to behavior, not just information processing.
Implications
Ties the hard problem to function: if experiences drive action, they aren’t just byproducts.
Cleeremans and Tallon-Baudry’s Functional Value
Cleeremans and Tallon-Baudry propose that “subject-level experience—‘What it feels like’—is endowed with intrinsic value, and it is precisely the value agents associate with their experiences that explains why they do certain things and avoid others.” Because experiences have value and guide behavior, they argue, “consciousness has a function” and that under “this hypothesis of ‘phenomenal worthiness’ … conscious agents ‘experience’ things and ‘care’ about those experiences” (Cleeremans & Tallon-Baudry, 2022).
The authors note that “the function of consciousness” has been “addressed mostly by philosophers,” yet “surprisingly few things have been written about [it] … in the neuroscientific or psychological literature.” The reason, they surmise, is the “classical view” that “subjective experience is a mere epiphenomenon that affords no functional advantage." They reject such “consciousness inessentialism” by appealing to “how the concept of value has been approached in decision-making, emotion research and consciousness research” and by arguing that “phenomenal consciousness has intrinsic value”—such as it being “the central drive for the discovery and creation of new behaviours.” They conclude that consciousness “must have a function” (Cleeremans & Tallon-Baudry, 2022).
Under their hypothesis, “consciousness would have evolved and been selected because it adds an important degree of freedom to the machinery of reward-based behaviour: behaviour that seems purposeless from a purely functional perspective nevertheless has intrinsic value. But this, crucially, only holds when associated with conscious experience.” Phenomenal experience, they speculate, “might act as a mental currency of sorts, which not only endows conscious mental states with intrinsic value but also makes it possible for conscious agents to compare vastly different experiences in a common subject-centered space”—a feature, they claim, that “readily explains the fact that consciousness is ‘unified.’” They offer the “phenomenal worthiness hypothesis” as a way to make “the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness more tractable, since it can then be reduced to a problem about function”—an offering unlikely to persuade nonmaterialists (Cleeremans & Tallon-Baudry, 2022).
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