{"id":227928,"date":"2025-12-27T21:05:51","date_gmt":"2025-12-28T03:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/why-consciousness-cant-be-reduced-to-code"},"modified":"2025-12-27T21:05:51","modified_gmt":"2025-12-28T03:05:51","slug":"why-consciousness-cant-be-reduced-to-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/why-consciousness-cant-be-reduced-to-code","title":{"rendered":"Why consciousness can\u2019t be reduced to code"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/why-consciousness-cant-be-reduced-to-code.webp\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The familiar fight between \u201cmind as software\u201d and \u201cmind as biology\u201d may be a false choice. This work proposes biological computationalism: the idea that brains compute, but not in the abstract, symbol-shuffling way we usually imagine. Instead, computation is inseparable from the brain\u2019s physical structure, energy constraints, and continuous dynamics. That reframes consciousness as something that emerges from a special kind of computing matter, not from running the right program.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The familiar fight between \u201cmind as software\u201d and \u201cmind as biology\u201d may be a false choice. This work proposes biological computationalism: the idea that brains compute, but not in the abstract, symbol-shuffling way we usually imagine. Instead, computation is inseparable from the brain\u2019s physical structure, energy constraints, and continuous dynamics. That reframes consciousness as something [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,1523,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biological","category-computing","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}