Michael Trestman
Independent researcher
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Michael Trestman is an independent researcher in the philosophy of biology whose work reconstructs the evolution of agency. His doctoral work and subsequent papers map how distinct suites of traits, active movement, sensory expansion, and integrated decision-making, emerged together in basal metazoans, producing the first animals whose behavior was organized around a self that acts in the world. His 2024 Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper with Scott Coombs, “A multi-trait embodied framework for the evolution of brains and cognition across animal phyla” (DOI 10.1017/S0140525X24000335, PMID 39465599), turns that reconstruction into a comparative framework where cognition tracks a bundle of embodied traits rather than brain size alone.
The position this defends matters to the origins side of the site’s coverage. The UAL framework of Ginsburg and Jablonka and the Feinberg-Mallatt neurobiological account both need an account of what changed when agency first appeared, and Trestman’s trait-bundle analysis supplies one at the level of evolutionary evidence.
For artificial minds, the framework’s implication is structural. If mindedness evolved as a coordinated suite of capacities for acting in a world, then machine assessments that test capacities one at a time may miss the coordination that matters, a caution the site’s indicator posts carry forward.
Known for. Agency and consciousness across basal metazoans, Cambrian origins of mindedness, multi-trait evolution of brains and cognition
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Michael Trestman 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.