Eva Jablonka

Eva Jablonka is an evolutionary theorist at Tel Aviv University whose work with Simona Ginsburg supplies the origins-of-consciousness debate with its only fully functional marker. Their Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) framework holds that an organism capable of open-ended, combinatorial, supramodal associative learning is a minimal conscious organism by hypothesis. The claim is functional rather than anatomical, which makes it testable across lineages and, in principle, across substrates. The 2020 primer with Jonathan Birch, examined on this site in the UAL analysis, states the marker and its predictions, attributing minimal consciousness to specific phyla and withholding it from others on stated grounds.

The framework’s historical claim is that the UAL transition occurred in small-brained Cambrian lineages, making consciousness tens of millions of years older than the vertebrate brain and distributed across arthropod and mollusk history. The 2025 Philosophical Transactions paper extends the theory, examining the goals and functions of consciousness and arguing that its evolution opened a new category of selection, one that acts on learned and constructed representations rather than only on genes and bodies. Their 2019 MIT Press book, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul, is the argument’s full development.

Jablonka’s broader program is relevant to this site for two reasons. It is the most developed evolutionary account of consciousness that treats the phenomenon as functional, aligning with the site’s substrate independent stance. And it demonstrates what a consciousness criterion looks like when it is built to generate predictions, the same discipline the site demands of AI consciousness indicators.

Known for. Unlimited Associative Learning as a marker for the origin of consciousness, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul, evolution of meaning and epigenetic inheritance

Coverage on this site

• Ginsburg and Jablonka's Unlimited Associative Learning Marks the Origin of Consciousness September 2026

Related researchers

• SG Simona GinsburgThe Open University of IsraelUnlimited Associative Learning, minimal consciousness marker, The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul, associative learning and the Cambrian explosion Biological naturalist1 article
• Jonathan BirchLondon School of Economics and Political ScienceThe Edge of Sentience, the LSE Criteria, and the run-ahead principle AI welfare13 articles
• FB František BaluškaUniversity of BonnCellular consciousness, subcellular nanobrains, plant neurobiology, sentient cells as units of physiology Biological naturalist1 article
• TB Tristan A. BekinschteinDepartment of Psychology / Consciousness and Cognition Lab, University of CambridgeClinical biomarkers of consciousness, local-global auditory paradigm, transitions from wakefulness to sedation, neural dynamics of awareness Biological naturalist1 article
• TB Tomas Berjaga-BuisanComputational Neuroscience Group, Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, BarcelonaNon-equilibrium thermodynamics of whole-brain models, fluctuation-dissipation theorem violations as a non-invasive consciousness marker Biological naturalist1 article
• DB Douglas BlackistonAllen Discovery Center at Tufts UniversityMemory stability during brain remodeling, xenobot platform design, amphibian memory transplantation work Biological naturalist1 article

Eva Jablonka is listed with the other biological naturalists, who hold that consciousness requires living metabolic hardware. 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.