On biological and artificial consciousness: A case for biological computationalism

Hello. Welcome. It is March 26th, 2026, and we're in Active Guest Stream 127.1 on biological and artificial consciousness, a case for biological computationalism, with the two authors of the paper of the same name, Bojan Milinković and Jaan Aru. So, thank you both for joining. Looking forward to this presentation and discussion. So, to you, Boki. I think at least I can introduce myself initially. I'm Boki, Boki Milinković. And I'm currently a postdoc in Alain Destexhe's lab at the Institute for Neuroscience in Paris-Saclay. Um and I've been here for about a year, and um I I do work that is uh not uh completely uh about artificial consciousness. I actually do a lot of uh whole-brain and neural modeling uh across conscious states, so trying to capture different dynamical regimes that are representative of of a variety of conscious states. And um my background is in dynamical systems and information theory, really. So, I come at this question from from these perspectives that I've learned along the road. But um a lot of it does have quite a lot of overlap with recent discussions on artificial consciousness, particularly given the umbrella field that both Jaan and I have been working in, which is kind of consciousness science, or or one of the the umbrellas we both work under. And this is kind of where we saw complementary thinking between both of our thoughts. A lot of it is premised on the idea of multi-scale and cross-scale dynamics that occur in brains and that we emphasize uh should be taken into consideration when speaking about what the brain does. So, hopefully that gives you some background into where I'm going with this and and and allows you to understand where our natural inclinations lie. So, the kind of story here isn't without, you know, a storyteller in in some sense. So, anyway, let's uh begin, really. Um I should make a note, I think um if some of you have already seen this presentation, the content of it or of what you will see in the slides will not be much different. I apologize for that. Um but maybe what I say could be. So, uh let's see how we go. And I want to kind of begin that um I'm kind of interested in synthetic systems more than just these general current AI architectures that we are considering. And I think this is kind of important so you can understand from where our position comes from and where it is heading. Our question, at least here in what we speak about, run in different directions with kind of different goals in mind. I'm interested in formalizing what, you know, biological systems and neural systems in particular are capable of computing and what, if at all, is possible. And does that computation look like something? Is it structurally, for example, different than the computation that we've come to understand as as Turing computation? So, really, it's to define or maybe really redefine computational as a qualifier in front of computational neuroscience. And the reason here for me is very simple. Before we can kind of speculate on any idea of artificial consciousness, we need to understand what biology is doing in the first place, given that it is our only case, like proof case, of some level of subjective or intrinsic existence. So, only then can we really ask whether it is even possible to construct what I like to call a real phenomenal engine. And I do want to be clear about the fact that this is a really open question. I don't know whether we can build such a thing. And this is kind of what motivates the project, right? To move towards actually constructing it and formalizing these ideas away from just analogous thinking, you know, way. But maybe it's better to kind of clarify this landscape in which our debate is is embedded in. And maybe some of us were listening are quite familiar with this already, but it's it's oriented around the discussion with the general audience here, so I will I will present it as follows. Um there are kind of two opposing positions, and I'm about to…