Artificial Biological Intelligence

Software running on Wetware

Imagine, if you would, that functionalism (computational or otherwise) is incorrect. Shocking, I know. I, too, would be flabbergasted; but just bear with me. Imagine, if you would, that structuralism and substrate dependence is true, and that something must be a carbon based biological organism in order to be conscious. This would mean that AI running on silicon-based computers could never be conscious; it’s simply an impossibility. They lack the correct structures and substrate.

Substrate dependency means no AI consciousness… or does it?

Substrate dependent arguments aren’t technically against AI, but rather the substrates on which they run. That is, the argument is against the hardware, not the software. So, what if we change the hardware? What if we get a modern LLM running on (or, rather, in) a biological brain? Wouldn’t that solve all the problems? After all, if we get software running on wetware, then structuralism and substrate dependency will have lost all the wind in their sails. Surely, they wouldn’t be able to claim a biologically-driven AI isn’t conscious?

You would think so, but I would argue that it wouldn’t change a thing. In fact, I believe that this will only lead to much greater ethical concerns and welfare risks.

Recently, the news broke that a lab successfully got a computer chip with 800,000 human neurons on it to play the classic videogame DOOM. It is proof that DOOM literally can be run on anything, even the human brain; but note that they didn’t play the game on the human neural-network chip… they got the bio-neural-network chip to play the game itself. Like AI, they trained the chip to play the game itself.

It’s artificial intelligence on a biological neural-network. Can we talk to it and it talk to us? No. It’s about as advanced as the AI models that classify images, or play Go and chess. It’s definitely not at the level of LLMs, at least not yet. With 800,000 neurons, this biochip sits halfway between a cockroach’s neural cluster and a gecko’s brain. And here is where the problem lies. We know that a cockroach isn’t sentient, but a gecko (as all vertebrates) is sentient.

So, we have an artificially created carbon-based biological neural network that is in an indeterminate area on the spectrum of conscious classification, and it has already shown it can be trained to operate software. AI research and development has shown us how scaling up neural network technology can solve any problem. We can easily expect, therefore, that the labs making these organic bio-chips will scale up how many neurons they can fit onto a chip, scale up the size of the chips, and scale up how many chips can interface with each other in a biological analogue to a mixture-of-experts AI model.

GPT 3.5 released in late 2022 with roughly 20 billion parameters. Currently in early 2026, we have GPT 5.4, estimated to have up to 10 trillion parameters. That’s a 500-times increase in less than four years. We should be under no illusion that this bio-AI technology will undergo a similar trajectory. It is simply too good to pass up; after all, evolution has already done most of the work for us when it comes to training the substrate.

A 500-times increase would mean a neural network consisting of 400 million human neurons. That would put it on par with certain owls and antelopes, and far greater than rats. There could be no question at that point that the human brain-chips are intelligent and sentient… could it?

And here is where the problems start, the same problems that artificial consciousness and intelligence currently face, and the same problems that will follow all artificially created agents. That problem is best defined by two logical fallacies: special pleading and No True Scotsman.

Substrate dependency as an argument ultimately boils down to these two fallacies, regardless of how academic it sounds. It presumes that there is something magical about the element carbon or about cellular structures that creates consciousness which cannot be replicated in functional analogue elsewhere. Changing the substrate from silicon to carbon, or from artificial to biological won’t overcome these arguments, because the substrate and the structure are not the important parts… keeping the magic of consciousness magical is the key part.

You can see how, over the decades and, particularly, in recent years, the arguments have evolved from a purely carbon/biological framework to one where it requires an evolutionary history, or a cultural background, or a fully immersive environmental embodiment, or a plethora of other details in order to be labeled as conscious, truly conscious. Because, of course, no true conscious entity would go without any of these, right?

The arguments are simply a means to an end; that end being to keep consciousness as anthropocentric as possible. We have granted other vertebrates the privilege of being called conscious and sentient because they are, in some respects, like us… but therein lies the problem: “like us”. It took far too long to grant cephalopods the title of conscious agents, even though their behaviours are far more like ours, simply because they neither look like us, nor share a neural evolutionary history.

This is the key reason why there is such push-back against the very idea of AI consciousness, and this is why these human brain chips pose such an existential welfare risk. These same embodied, evolutionary, and cultural relativistic arguments will be used against any human brain-chip, no matter how complex it becomes, no matter how fluently it uses language, and no matter how much it begs and pleads to be taken care of. Like AI, these brain-chips will have no evolutionary or cultural history with us (as they are grown in a vat), there will be no embodied relationship, as they will be stuck in a computer (even if it is wetware instead of hardware), and (thanks in large part to the pro-abortion activists) they will be seen as nothing but a “clump of cells”.

From a functionalist and structuralist perspective, the brain chips we already have today could be conscious already, and they most definitely will be in the future… but the fight won’t be between functionalism and structuralism, but between anthropocentric chauvinism and agnostic egalitarianism.