Todd E. Feinberg

Todd E. Feinberg is a neurologist and psychiatrist who spent two decades building a neuroevolutionary answer to a question most consciousness research skips. Not what consciousness is, but when it started and what had to be in place first. With the evolutionary morphologist Jon M. Mallatt he wrote The Ancient Origins of Consciousness. How the Brain Created Experience (MIT Press, 2016, ISBN 9780262034333), which places the first conscious animals in the Cambrian and locates their experience in the optic tectum rather than in any cortex.

The position he defends is neurobiological emergentism. Consciousness is a genuinely emergent process, not an illusion and not a separate substance, and it emerges from a particular kind of neural organisation rather than from computation in general. He sets out the argument formally in “Neurobiological emergentism. Sentience as an emergent process and the experiential gap” (Frontiers in Psychology 16, 1528982, 2025) and at book length in From Sensing to Sentience. How Feeling Emerges from the Brain (MIT Press, 2024, ISBN 9780262550956). The features he and Mallatt identify as necessary are grouped differently across their papers, from two broad requirements in their 2013 account to around a dozen sub-items in their 2020 one, and they cover neural complexity, hierarchical and reentrant processing, isomorphic sensory maps, valenced affective states, attention and memory.

What makes him worth reading closely on this site is that his conclusion cuts against it. If sentience needs living tissue that manages a real metabolic budget, then substrate independence is false and no amount of correct organisation in silicon will do. That claim is stated carefully enough to be argued with, which is more than most objections manage. His own evidence is the interesting part. The organisation he identifies appeared three separate times in three lineages built from different parts, which is at least as good an argument that the organisation is what matters as it is that the tissue is.

His work is the stated foundation of this project’s technical architecture, and where each of the features he names appears across the animal record is mapped in the origins console.

Known for. The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, neurobiological emergentism, and the experiential gap

Coverage on this site

• Jon Mallatt and Todd Feinberg Animal-Only Sentience and the Substrate Independence Challenge August 2026
• Todd Feinberg's Neurobiological Emergentism June 2026

Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers, grouped by the position their published work defends. The positions themselves are set out in the index of consciousness theories.