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 2026 collaboration with Michael Levin’s group on large language models as cognitive viruses, “Large-Language Models as a Cognitive Virus” (arXiv:2609.03344), models how machine cognition propagates through human collectives, examined on this site’s Levin cluster pages including the bioelectric cognition analysis.
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
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
- 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
- Douglas BlackistonAllen Discovery Center at Tufts UniversityMemory stability during brain remodeling, xenobot platform design, amphibian memory transplantation work
- Scott L. BrincatPicower Institute for Learning and Memory, MITElectrophysiology of primate prefrontal cortex, traveling oscillatory waves, and Analog Cognition and Consciousness (2026)
- Paco CalvoUniversity of MurciaPlant cognition and plant neurobiology, minimal cognition without neurons, Planta Sapiens, cognitive ecology of plants
- Robin Carhart-HarrisNeuroscape / UC San Francisco / Imperial College LondonThe Entropic Brain Hypothesis (2014, 2018), REBUS model of relaxed beliefs under psychedelics, functional neuroimaging of altered conscious states
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.