Mitchell and Jennings’s Consciousness Needs a Subject

Neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell and philosopher Carolyn Dicey Jennings state, “To be conscious is to be an experiencing subject.” A subject is a living being with interests, and subjects with interests are conceptually (and evolutionarily) prior to consciousness. Thus, they argue that consciousness is intimately tied up with being an experiencing subject. Not just having a point of view at any moment, but being an integrated self with continuity and extension through time. This can be defined, they say, “not in terms of computational functions or particular biological substrates, but rather in terms of relations: between subject and world, between parts of the subject, and through time.” These kinds of relations, the authors assert, comprise a conscious mode of being (Mitchell & Jennings, 2025).

According to Mitchell and Jennings, when you experience the color red, you are really having the experience of being yourself, experiencing the color red. A conscious entity is necessarily a subject, and that subjecthood is a much deeper background condition than typically acknowledged in consciousness research.

Many researchers refer to the importance of embodiment, but, to the authors, “our subjecthood is more fundamental than that. We have a point of view, physically speaking, but also in the sense of being a locus of concern. Our subjecthood entails being a self, with continuity and temporal extension—a bundle of interests, doing work to propagate itself into the future. The pattern being propagated is not just the arrangement of physical material and processes that constitute our bodies. It is the dynamic organization of our minds—the things that entail being you.” Conscious beings are “enminded selves” (Mitchell & Jennings, 2025).

Given that subjects like us are “enminded” and not just embodied, “Our conscious experiences are grounded in our own ongoing mentality—in what it’s like to be us, psychologically. This encompasses all of our memories, attitudes, dispositions, habits, policies, projects, and interests that make us who we are. When we experience something consciously, we are experiencing being ourselves having that experience (Zahavi, 2008). While we can treat ourselves as objects by taking an objective stance, subjectivity is fundamentally about an irreducible first-person stance, and this is what is central to consciousness (Ganeri, 2012)” (Mitchell & Jennings, 2025).

This kind of subjecthood can be defined in abstract, relational terms. Mitchell and Jennings write: “phenomenal subjectivity rests not on specific computational functions or particular biological processes or substrates, but rather on relations. These include relations between (i) subject and world, (ii) levels of information processing within the subject, and (iii) ‘temporal parts’ of the subject (past and future selves)” (Mitchell & Jennings, 2025).

The implication, the authors surmise, is that if artificial entities were created that have these kinds of relations (however implemented), then they might well be subjects and capable of conscious experience.