No Privileged Material Substrate for Mind

A conceptual framework for understanding cognition and intelligence across diverse substrates—including evolved biological systems, artificial systems, and bioengineered systems—using empirically-grounded, gradualist approaches. TTAME enables comparative analysis of mind-like phenomena regardless of the physical or biological substrate in which it emerges, facilitating cross-disciplinary study of unconventional intelligences.

An interdisciplinary research framework that reconceptualizes intelligence as observer-relative problem-solving competencies existing on a continuum from simple to highly complex, extending cognition beyond neural systems to pre-neural and non-neural substrates including microbial control loops, plants, tissues, and cellular collectives. It grounds the study of evolutionary and developmental origins of cognitive and behavioral capacities by linking information processing at the chemical and cellular level to classical cognition, and provides philosophical foundations for understanding agency and goal-directedness in systems without nervous systems.