Johannes Kleiner
University of Bamberg, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Johannes Kleiner is a mathematical consciousness scientist based at the University of Bamberg’s Institute for Psychology, affiliated with the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy and the Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science. His work builds the formal machinery the consciousness field argues with, from mathematical treatments of integrated information theory to the falsifiability analysis he developed with Erik Hoel, which shows that no falsifiable and non-trivial theory of consciousness can classify a static large language model as conscious.
His 2025 preprint Defining Biological Naturalism (DOI 10.20378/irb-109961) makes a methodological argument in the AI consciousness debate. Biological naturalism, as Anil Seth presents it, is a necessary counterweight to computational functionalism, but its properties are only contingently unique to living systems, so without an explicit definition the position degrades into a gap-filling strategy. Kleiner generalizes Putnam’s 1967 explication of computational functionalism to any Formal Description and defines biological naturalism negatively, as the claim that conscious organisms admit no such description, which excludes artificial systems in virtue of how they are built.
This site covers that argument in the Kleiner definition problem post and his falsifiability collaboration with Hoel in the Kleiner-Hoel dilemma post. His position is on the biological naturalist side of the substrate debate, stated as a research programme rather than a verdict.
Known for. Mathematical consciousness science, the Kleiner-Hoel dilemma, Defining Biological Naturalism
Coverage on this site
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Johannes Kleiner 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.