Ricard Solé
ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
Ricard Solé is an ICREA research professor at the Complex Systems Lab of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, with ties to the Santa Fe Institute, and one of the physicists who rebuilt biology as a complex-systems discipline. His papers on phase transitions in living matter, cognitive graphs, and the origins of language treat mind-like organization as a predictable outcome of network dynamics under constraint, a framework that applies to cells, ecological collectives, and artificial systems with the same mathematics. His September 2026 collaboration with Giulio Ruffini, David Krakauer, and Michael Levin, “Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus” (arXiv:2609.03344), models how machine cognition propagates through human collectives with bistable hysteresis, examined in our dedicated analysis of the Solé and Levin cognitive-virus model and on the bioelectric cognition page.
The position his work defends is substrate-agnostic by construction. If cognition is an attractor of network dynamics, then the substrate that realizes the network is secondary to its organization, which places Solé’s framework among the strongest theoretical allies of the site’s functionalist emergentism.
His profile anchors the complex-systems wing of the database, where the question “is it conscious” becomes “what phase is the network in”, and the answer is a measurement.
Known for. Complex systems theory of cognition across cells, brains and machines, phase transitions in living systems, cognitive graphs, language origins
Coverage on this site
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Michael LevinAllen Discovery Center, Tufts UniversityBioelectric signalling, the cognitive light cone, and diverse intelligence
- Giulio RuffiniStarlab Barcelona. NeuroelectricsKolmogorov theory (KT) of consciousness, algorithmic information theory of structured experience, transcranial electrical stimulation and brain network modeling, co-author of Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus
- David KrakauerSanta Fe InstituteEvolution of intelligence and stupidity, complementary versus competitive cognitive artifacts, information theory of individuality, co-author of Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus
- František BaluškaUniversity of BonnCellular consciousness, subcellular nanobrains, plant neurobiology, sentient cells as units of physiology
- 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
- 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
Ricard Solé 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.