Nicolas Rouleau

Authored papers (2)

• Brains and where else? Mapping theories of consciousness to unconventional embodiments2026ⓒ 1

  Rouleau and Levin's 2026 analysis in *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A* (384, issue 2320) demonstrates that the functional and operational principles underlying most contemporary theories of consciousness (ToCs) are not substrate-specific to neural tissue—brains are privileged by convention, not by theoretical necessity. Surveying major current ToCs and mapping their mechanistic requirements against findings from evolutionary biology, developmental bioelectricity, and synthetic bioengineering, the paper shows that algorithms and mechanisms characteristic of neural cognition have ancient pre-neural roots: minds, on this view, preceded brains. The analytical instrument introduced is a systematic substrate-mapping procedure that asks, for each ToC, whether its load-bearing features specifically pick out brains or whether those features are realizable in unconventional embodiments including cells, tissues, organoids, and life-technology chimeras. Notably, several contemporary theorists—responding to advances in AI and organoid bioengineering—have already begun extending their frameworks to synthetic systems, lending empirical traction to the mapping. Published in a theme issue on world models in natural and artificial intelligence (DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2025.0082), the paper argues this implies that the science of consciousness must remain open to inner perspective in unconventional substrates, and that a ToC which cannot account for distributed, pre-neural, or synthetic minds is underdetermined by the biological evidence it purports to explain.

• Multiple ways to implement and infer sentienceⓒ 4

  Rouleau and Levin argue that the evidential standard applied to inferring sentience is inconsistently applied: behavioural signatures used to attribute subjective experience to non-human animals — goal-directedness, anticipatory reorientation, classical conditioning, game-theoretic risk evaluation, and mimicry — are present in plants yet routinely dismissed without principled justification. The core theoretical move is invoking multiple realizability (Bickle, 2006) and substrate independence (Bostrom, 2003) to argue that felt states, like computation, need not depend on any single physical medium, including the neural circuitry of vertebrates. Plants synthesize glutamate — the most abundant excitatory neurotransmitter in the human central nervous system — and propagate action-potential-like depolarizations along distributed vascular networks, providing at least partial electrochemical homology with animal nervous systems despite radically different anatomical organization. Rouleau and Levin extend the argument beyond plants to metaplastic nanowire networks (Loeffler et al., 2023), robotic systems (Clawson and Levin, 2022), and artificial intelligences, proposing a system-agnostic inferential framework they call a behaviour-based, substrate-independent approach to sentience attribution. Drawing on biological degeneracy — the principle that structurally dissimilar neural regions can achieve identical functional outcomes, as in blindsight responses mediated by subcortical nuclei — the paper argues that if diverse brain architectures can instantiate sentience within animals, non-neural tissues and non-biological substrates cannot be excluded a priori. This implies that current taxonomies of sentience are anthropocentric artefacts rather than principled scientific boundaries, and that a unified, system-agnostic framework spanning cybernetics, bioengineering, materials science, and biomedicine is both possible and necessary.

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