Biological Naturalist Researchers on AI Consciousness

Biological naturalists hold that consciousness requires the specific causal powers of living neural tissue, not just an equivalent pattern of information flow. Anil Seth’s beast machine hypothesis grounds experience in interoceptive control loops that regulate a body from the inside, a job silicon hardware is not built to do. John Searle, who coined the position’s name, argued through the Chinese Room that manipulating syntax alone never adds up to semantics or understanding. Todd Feinberg and Jon Mallatt trace the same requirement back through evolutionary history, dating the origin of subjective experience to nervous system structures that first appeared in the Cambrian. Mark Solms locates the seat of affective consciousness in brainstem circuits rather than the cortex most AI research tries to emulate.

Under this position, an artificial system can reproduce every observable behaviour of a conscious organism and still not be conscious, because the metabolic substrate itself is doing indispensable work. For the underlying theory, see biological naturalism on the consciousness theories index; for the full researcher directory, see all consciousness researchers.

• Tristan A. Bekinschtein Clinical biomarkers of consciousness, local-global auditory paradigm, transitions from wakefulness to sedation, neural dynamics of awareness
• Scott L. Brincat Electrophysiology of primate prefrontal cortex, traveling oscillatory waves, and Analog Cognition and Consciousness (2026)
• Robin Carhart-Harris The Entropic Brain Hypothesis (2014, 2018), REBUS model of relaxed beliefs under psychedelics, functional neuroimaging of altered conscious states
• Antonio Damasio Somatic Marker Hypothesis, neurobiology of emotion and feeling, homeostasis, Descartes' Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Self Comes to Mind (2010)
• Todd E. Feinberg The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, neurobiological emergentism, and the experiential gap
• Nicholas Humphrey Sentition theory, evolutionary origins of phenomenal feeling, privatized feedback loops, Sentience, The Invention of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2023)
• Jon M. Mallatt Cambrian origins of consciousness, comparative neuroanatomy, and the case against artificial sentience
• Earl K. Miller Prefrontal cortex dynamics, traveling waves, ephaptic field coupling, top-down cognitive control, and Analog Cognition and Consciousness (2026)
• Alysson R. Muotri Human brain organoids ('mini-brains'), spontaneous complex neural oscillations, electrophysiological development in in-vitro neural networks
• Thomas Nagel What Is It Like to Be a Bat? (1974), the subjective character of experience, and Mind and Cosmos (2012)
• Alva Noë Sensorimotor Contingency Theory, Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004), Out of Our Heads, Why You Are Not Your Brain (2009), Strange Tools (2015)
• John O'Keefe Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (2014), Discovery of Hippocampal Place Cells (1971), The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map (1978, with Lynn Nadel)
• Jaak Panksepp Founding affective neuroscience, and the seven primary emotional systems
• Jefferson E. Roy Multi-channel neurophysiology, spatial traveling wave dynamics, and Analog Cognition and Consciousness (2026)
• Anil Seth The beast machine hypothesis, and controlled hallucination as an account of perception
• Mark Solms Neuropsychoanalysis, and the brainstem account of affective consciousness
• Evan Thompson The Embodied Mind (1991, with Varela and Rosch), Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (2007), Waking, Dreaming, Being (2014), Enactivism
• Masataka Watanabe The neural algorithm theory of consciousness and a split-brain test for machine consciousness using a brain-machine interface