Today's arguments about consciousness often get stuck between two firm camps. One is computational functionalism, which says thinking can be fully described as abstract information processing. If a system has the right functional organization (regardless of the material it runs on), it should produce consciousness. The other is biological naturalism, which argues the opposite. It says consciousness cannot be separated from the special features of living brains and bodies because biology is not just a container for cognition, it is part of cognition itself. Both views capture real insights, but the deadlock suggests an important piece is still missing.

In our new paper, we propose a different approach: biological computationalism. The label is meant to be provocative, but also to sharpen the conversation. Our main argument is that the standard computational framework is broken, or at least poorly suited to how brains actually work. For a long time, it has been tempting to picture the mind as software running on neural hardware, with the brain "computing" in roughly the way a conventional computer does. But real brains are not von Neumann machines, and forcing that comparison leads to shaky metaphors and fragile explanations. If we want a serious account of how brains compute, and what it would take to build minds in other substrates, we first need a broader definition of what "computation" can be.

Biological computation, as we describe it, has three core features.

Hybrid Brain Computation in Real Time

First, biological computation is hybrid. It mixes discrete events with continuous dynamics. Neurons fire spikes, synapses release neurotransmitters, and networks shift through event-like states. At the same time, these events unfold within constantly changing physical conditions such as voltage fields, chemical gradients, ionic diffusion, and time-varying conductances. The brain is not purely digital, and it is not simply an analog machine either. Instead, it works as a multi-layered system where continuous processes influence discrete events, and discrete events reshape the continuous background, over and over, in an ongoing feedback loop.

Why Brain Computation Cannot Be Separated by Scale

Second, biological computation is scale-inseparable. In conventional computing, it is often possible to cleanly separate software from hardware, or a "functional level" from an "implementation level." In the brain, that kind of separation breaks down. There is no neat dividing line where you can point to the algorithm on one side and the physical mechanism on the other. Cause and effect run across many scales at once, from ion channels to dendrites to circuits to whole-brain dynamics, and these levels do not behave like independent modules stacked in layers. In biological systems, changing the "implementation" changes the "computation," because the two are tightly intertwined.