Catherine Tallon-Baudry
Inserm and École Polytechnique, Paris
AI welfare Whatever the metaphysics, uncertainty already creates obligations
Catherine Tallon-Baudry, research director at Inserm and École Polytechnique in Paris, began her career measuring the gamma oscillations that became a standard currency of consciousness science, and then redirected the field’s attention downward. Her experimental program shows that brain responses locked to the heartbeat predict aspects of conscious perception, that the stomach’s rhythm contributes to self-related processing, and that the neural self is built from interoception, the sensing of the body from within. Her 2022 work on the value of consciousness argues the function question directly, asking what consciousness is for rather than only where it happens (PMID 35479522).
The position her program defends is that subjective experience is anchored in bodily regulation, a view with direct consequences for the AI debate. An agent with no body to regulate, no heartbeat to feel, lacks the very anchor her data identify for the self. That is a testable difference between biological and current artificial systems, and it feeds the site’s coverage of embodiment indicators and of the affective consciousness tradition.
Known for. Heartbeat-evoked brain activity and the gastric self, interoception as the ground of subjective experience, gamma oscillations research, the value of consciousness
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Catherine Tallon-Baudry is listed with the other welfare and moral status researchers, who hold that whatever the metaphysics, uncertainty already creates obligations. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.