Ismael's Reflexive Representation and Situated Self

Philosopher of science Jenann Ismael develops a naturalistic account of phenomenal consciousness centered on self-representation, perspectival presentation, and the distinctive epistemology of first-person experience, while explicitly resisting the stronger claim that self-representation constitutes consciousness itself. Her dual-content architecture explains how a cognitive system can represent the world while simultaneously presenting and reflexively identifying its own occurrent states, thereby generating the immediacy, privacy, ownership, and apparent epistemic privilege characteristic of conscious experience (Ismael, 1999, 2006, 2011). The resulting position is naturalistic but nonreductive primarily in an epistemic and semantic sense: explanatory gaps between physical descriptions and phenomenal experience arise from the perspectival architecture of cognition rather than establishing ontologically irreducible phenomenal properties or dualism.

In other words, Ismael’s naturalistic account explains how a physical system can represent the world from a position inside it, and argues that the structural peculiarities of such reflexive self-representation generate the appearance of an explanatory gap without any corresponding ontological gap. Her central move is to treat phenomenal concepts as indexical, analogous to "I" and "now," so that the seeming unbridgeability between physical and phenomenal description becomes a predictable artifact of how self-locating representation works rather than evidence of a non-physical property. Crucially, as noted, she does not hold that self-representation constitutes phenomenal consciousness: she distinguishes self-consciousness, a formal property of any medium capable of taking its own contents as objects, from consciousness proper, a qualitative property that only some self-conscious media possess. The result is a deflationary interpretation of subjectivity and of the epistemic gaps, offered as a resource available to self-representational accounts rather than as a self-representational theory of phenomenal consciousness in its own right.

Phenomenal Knowledge as Self-Location

Ismael’s early account begins with the apparent epistemic gulf between complete physical knowledge and knowing what an experience is like. In “Science and the Phenomenal,” she compares phenomenal knowledge with self-location on a map. A map may contain all relevant objective spatial information while failing, considered by itself, to tell its user which represented location is “here.” Analogously, a subject could possess exhaustive third-person information about a neural state without knowing what occupying that state is like because she lacks the first-person relation that identifies the objectively described state with a presently instantiated experience (Ismael, 1999).

This provides a distinctive response to the knowledge argument. Mary’s acquisition of color experience need not reveal an additional nonphysical property omitted by complete physical science. What she acquires is a new epistemic relation to a state already described objectively: she can now recognize and demonstratively identify that state from within experience. The difference between phenomenal and physical knowledge therefore resembles a difference between modes of presentation or representational standpoints rather than necessarily between properties in the world.

Ismael nevertheless does not dismiss phenomenal experience as merely verbal or conceptual. Her aim is to explain why first-person and third-person modes of access can remain systematically different even if the underlying ontology is naturalistic. The explanatory gap is consequently real as an epistemic and representational phenomenon, while its existence alone does not entail property dualism.

Dual Content and Reflexive Representation

“Doublemindedness” develops this insight into a model of cognitive architecture. Ismael imagines representational states that carry two kinds of content simultaneously. One is ordinary intentional content: the state represents objects, properties, or circumstances beyond itself. The other is presentational content deriving from properties instantiated in the representational state itself (Ismael, 2006). A conscious visual state, for example, can represent something as red while also providing the subject with an occurrent exemplar of what that kind of experience is like.

Because these representational structures partly overlap but are organized differently, identities between them can be cognitively significant even when they concern the same underlying state. A subject can therefore know everything expressible in an objective representational vocabulary while lacking the reflexive identification connecting that vocabulary to an experience presently displayed from the first-person perspective.

Self-representation enters when an occurrent state becomes reflexively available to the system itself. Rather than constructing a wholly separate representation that describes the first state from outside, the cognitive system can employ the very state being represented as a demonstrative exemplar—roughly, “this experience is such-and-such neural or functional state.” In this sense the representing state enters its own representational scope (Ismael, 2006).

Such an architecture, according to Ismael, helps explain several familiar marks of phenomenal consciousness. Present experience seems immediately available rather than inferred; subjects enjoy a distinctive epistemic authority concerning their current experiences; experiences present themselves as belonging to the subject who has them; and another person cannot gain precisely the same first-person access merely by acquiring additional descriptive information.

This brings Ismael close to self-representational theories of consciousness but also sharply distinguishes her from their stronger versions. Kriegel and related theorists propose that a mental state is phenomenally conscious because, in the appropriate manner, it represents itself (Kriegel, 2006). Ismael instead argues that reflexive representation explains important structural and epistemological features associated with consciousness and helps explain why the phenomenal/physical gap appears so resistant to conventional reduction. She does not claim that self-representation is sufficient to generate phenomenal experience (Ismael, 2006).

The Situated Phenomenal Field

In The Situated Self, Ismael places this reflexive architecture within a broader model of an embodied agent dynamically representing both its environment and itself. Perceptual inputs are integrated into an evolving internal model containing information about the subject’s current location, bodily orientation, history, goals, actions, and expectations. Because the agent’s own actions alter subsequent sensory input, self-representation and world-representation form a recursively updating loop (Ismael, 2007, 2011).

The self on this account is not an immaterial Cartesian substance standing behind experience. It is an organized and dynamically maintained perspective within an embodied information-processing system. First-person consciousness emerges as a specially structured interface between the organism and the world in which the organism itself occupies an implicitly represented position.

Ismael calls the phenomenal field the “reflexive surface” of thought (Ismael, 2011). Phenomenal experience is where features of the world and features of the system’s own occurrent representational states become simultaneously available. Phenomenal concepts can therefore be grounded directly in displayed exemplars: one learns what a particular experience is like by having it, whereas objective scientific concepts are constructed precisely to abstract away from differences among observers and perspectives.

This difference explains why phenomenal character can appear resistant to translation into objective vocabulary. Scientific descriptions seek invariance across perspectives; phenomenal concepts depend constitutively upon a particular perspective. Their mismatch therefore does not reveal two ontological realms.

Phenomenality and the Limits of Reduction

The most important qualification is that Ismael does not regard reflexivity as a complete explanation of why there is something it is like to undergo a mental state. Indeed, she criticizes self-representational accounts when they are presented as reductive definitions of consciousness (Ismael, 2006). A cognitive architecture could possess sophisticated self-monitoring and self-modeling capacities without thereby establishing that its states are phenomenally conscious.

Her position is consequently unusual within the Higher-Order family. She accepts that reflexive representation illuminates the characteristic structure of consciousness—the subject’s relation to its own experience, its seeming immediacy, its first-personal character, and the persistence of explanatory gaps—while declining to identify phenomenal consciousness with that architecture.

This makes the theory ontologically naturalistic while preserving an irreducible difference between first-person phenomenal presentation and third-person objective description. Ismael does not posit an immaterial substance or nonphysical phenomenal properties in order to explain subjectivity. Yet she also does not claim that a functional or representational analysis eliminates the residual question of why such states feel like anything at all. The theory therefore offers more a diagnosis of the hard problem’s epistemic structure than a conventional solution to its metaphysical core.

Self-Consciousness and Consciousness Distinguished

The distinction that separates Ismael from Kriegel-style self-representationalism is explicit. Self-consciousness is the formal capacity of a medium to take its own contents as reflexive objects; consciousness is a qualitative property that some, but not all, self-conscious media have (Ismael, 2007). Artificial systems can in principle possess the former without the latter. It follows that the question "why do we make representations of the world?" concerns the emergence of reflexivity and is a different question from Dretske's (1995) question about the emergence and utility of conscious experience. This is a substantive departure from the self-representational thesis that a state is phenomenally conscious just in case it represents itself in the right way (Kriegel, 2009). Ismael supplies the architecture that self-representational theorists use while declining the constitutive claim they build on it.

Mary, Inverted Spectra, and Indexical Phenomenal Concepts

As noted, Ismael’s theory of phenomenal consciousness runs through two canonical cases. On Jackson's (1982) knowledge argument, Ismael's treatment belongs to the family of responses holding that phenomenal concepts are a species of indexical concept (Ismael, 1999); since familiar epistemic gaps already separate objective from indexical concepts, the gap Mary encounters is of a kind that arises among concepts referring to the same property, and it therefore supports no ontological conclusion. Ismael’s account of inverted spectra applies the same apparatus, distinguishing properties merely exemplified by a conscious state from those exemplified in what she calls the presentational domain. The general strategy is to explain why a reflexively structured representer would necessarily find its own states resistant to objective characterization, and then to argue that this explains the phenomenology of the hard problem while leaving physicalism intact. Critics have pressed whether the presentational domain can be specified without circularity, since the account must say which aspects of a state figure in self-representation and why.

Mind, Physics, and Perspective

Ismael’s later philosophy of physics extends this picture by treating minds as high-level, physically implemented information-processing systems whose organization need not mirror their neural realization point-for-point. Drawing on the notion of virtual-machine architecture, she argues that mental states and cognitive operations can be scientifically legitimate higher-level structures implemented in biological dynamics without being reducible to simple mappings onto neural components (Sloman & Chrisley, 2003; Ismael, 2022).

Conscious experience can accordingly be understood as part of a high-level control interface through which an embodied system integrates information, remembers, anticipates, and regulates action. But Ismael again separates these functional capacities from the hard problem of phenomenality: physics can characterize observers, agents, information flow, and neural implementation without thereby explaining why those processes are accompanied by experience.

Her work on quantum mechanics reinforces this distinction. Quantum theory makes the physical situatedness of observers especially salient, but Ismael does not argue that quantum processes generate consciousness. Indeed, in more recent work with Huw Price, “perspectives” in relational quantum mechanics are explicitly not restricted to conscious observers; ordinary physical systems can instantiate them (Ismael & Price, 2026). Quantum mechanics therefore contributes to her broader account of embedded perspective, not to a quantum theory of phenomenal consciousness.

Explanatory Power and Limits

Ismael’s distinctive contribution is to combine self-representation, first-person perspective, and naturalism while resisting both reductive representationalism and dualism. Her theory explains why phenomenal consciousness possesses a characteristic first-person epistemology and why complete third-person knowledge might nevertheless fail to provide phenomenal acquaintance. It also clarifies why self-representation could be extraordinarily important to consciousness without being constitutive of consciousness.

The corresponding limitation is fundamental. If reflexive architecture can occur without phenomenality, the theory does not specify what distinguishes a phenomenally conscious self-representing system from an equally sophisticated nonconscious one. Ismael therefore leaves the ontological source of phenomenal experience unresolved. Her contribution to the Landscape is best understood as an explanation of the architecture of subjectivity and of the explanatory gap itself: a sophisticated account of why consciousness appears from nowhere in objective description because consciousness is always encountered from somewhere.

References

Ismael, J. (1999). Science and the phenomenal. Philosophy of Science, 66(3), 351–369.

Ismael, J. (2006). Doublemindedness: A model for a dual content cognitive architecture. PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness, 12(2), 1–11.

Ismael, J. (2007). The Situated Self. Oxford University Press.

Ismael, J. (2011). Précis of The Situated Self. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 82(3), 733–758.

Ismael, J. (2022). Why physics should care about the mind, and how to think about it without worrying about the mind-body problem. In S. Gao (Ed.), Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics (pp. 156–176). Oxford University Press.

Ismael, J., & Price, H. (2026). Against totalitarianism—Introduction to Tractatus Quanticum. arXiv:2607.05459.

Kriegel, U. (2006). Consciousness and self-representation. PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Consciousness, 12(2).

Sloman, A., & Chrisley, R. (2003). Virtual machines and consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 10(4–5), 133–172.