Emily S. Finn
Yale School of Medicine
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
The 2015 fingerprinting result gave the identity-marker claim its first hard number. Emily Finn and colleagues identified 126 subjects across scan sessions from resting-state fMRI connectivity alone. Rest-to-rest identification reached 92.9 and 94.4 percent accuracy, and frontoparietal networks carried the signal at 98 to 99 percent. The same functional profile that supports cognition also tags the individual. No fingerprint was engineered. It fell out of the correlation structure the brain generates while doing nothing in particular.
The cross-state result disciplines the claim. Identification across mental states, from rest to task, dropped to 54.0 to 87.3 percent. The fingerprint is stable across sessions and softer across what the brain is doing. That softness is exactly where the state-versus-trait question lives, and it is why the fingerprint literature pairs naturally with consciousness measures that track state, such as the perturbational complexity index.
For the substrate-independence debate, the finding reframes what an emulated brain would have to preserve. A wiring diagram is not the identifier. The identifier is a dynamical profile generated on top of structure, which means a faithful emulation target is a running pattern rather than a static map. Finn’s later work on individual variability in brain dynamics extends the program, and the identity consequences are examined on The Consciousness Fingerprint.
Known for. Connectome fingerprinting, the demonstration that individual brains are identifiable from resting-state functional connectivity
Coverage on this site
No articles yet. This profile exists because the researcher's work is referenced elsewhere on the site, and coverage will be linked here as it is published.
Related researchers
-
Blaise Agüera y ArcasGoogle VP and Fellow, CTO of Technology & SocietyComputational functionalism, active inference, on-device neural computing, What Is Intelligence? (2025), and Who Are We Now? (2023)
- Igor AleksanderImperial College LondonAxiomatic Consciousness Theory, neural state machines, The World in My Mind, pioneering neural network engineering
-
Joscha BachCalifornia Institute for Machine ConsciousnessThe machine consciousness hypothesis, cyber animism, and MicroPsi
- Talis BachmannUniversity of TartuAttention-awareness theory, the preactivation hypothesis for conscious perception, masking and the microgenesis of awareness, perception without awareness
- Max BennettIndependent Researcher and AI EntrepreneurThe Five Breakthroughs evolutionary neuroscience framework and A Brief History of Intelligence (2023)
- Michael Timothy BennettSchool of Computing, Australian National UniversityMathematical foundations of emergent causality, valence-driven self-organization, and 'Why Is Anything Conscious?'
Emily S. Finn is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.