Consciousness May Require a New Kind of Computation

Consciousness May Require a New Kind of Computation

A new theoretical framework argues that the long-standing split between computational functionalism and biological naturalism misses how real brains actually compute. The authors propose “biological computationalism,” the idea that neural computation is inseparable from the brain’s physical, hybrid, and energy-constrained dynamics rather than an abstract algorithm running on hardware. In this view, discrete neural events and continuous physical …