William B. Miller Jr.
Not stated in the papers
Biological naturalist Consciousness requires living metabolic hardware
William B. Miller Jr. is the theorist behind Cognition-Based Evolution, a research program that recasts biology around cellular cognition. His core claim, developed across a series of papers with František Baluška and Arthur Reber, is that all biology is cognitive information processing. Cells sense their conditions, communicate through a range of molecular channels, and make assessments that shape their own behavior and that of their offspring. On this reading, the genome is a read-write biological medium rather than a one-way blueprint, and natural selection is better described as cognitive selection, the 2024 formulation examined on this site in the CBC and AI consciousness analysis.
The program’s relevance to consciousness runs through its sharpest claim. The 2025 Biosystems paper, “Biological mechanisms contradict AI consciousness”, argues that the informational loops of living cells are constitutive of sentience and that artificial systems, lacking those mechanisms, cannot be conscious however sophisticated their behavior. Miller’s version of the cellular consciousness position is therefore not merely descriptive biology. It is a direct argument against the substrate independence thesis this site defends, made from inside the biology literature.
The productive part of the disagreement is what Miller’s program shares with the site’s own interests. Both reject a brain-centered picture of cognition, and both treat information processing below the neuron as real and consequential. Where the site’s functionalist emergentism holds that phenomenal status remains an open empirical question for any substrate, Miller’s program closes it by locating sentience in cellular mechanisms. The dispute is precise, and the cellular cognition literature his program anchors is among the most active neighborhoods adjacent to artificial consciousness research.
Known for. Cognition-Based Evolution, the claim that all biology is cognitive information processing, natural selection as cognitive selection
Coverage on this site
Related researchers
- Arthur S. ReberUniversity of California, Los AngelesThe Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC) theory, The First Minds, the claim that every living cell is sentient
- 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)
- 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
- Antonio DamasioBrain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern CaliforniaSomatic Marker Hypothesis, neurobiology of emotion and feeling, homeostasis, Descartes' Error (1994), The Feeling of What Happens (1999), Self Comes to Mind (2010)
William B. Miller Jr. 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.