Synthetic Biological Intelligence

Brett Kagan's term, adopted by Laura Tripaldi, for computing devices in which live neurons are wired to electronics and learn to act inside a simulated world. The reference case is Cortical Labs' DishBrain (2022): human and rat cortical cells grown on a dense electrode array, fed "sensory" pulses about a Pong paddle and ball, and trained on Friston's free-energy principle with orderly stimulation for hits and noisy stimulation for misses. Tripaldi's interest is philosophical rather than engineering: the protocol works only because the feedback is biologically meaningful to the cells, so software is shaped by the substrate's physiology, and the resulting cognition is enacted in matter rather than modelled in silicon. SBI is therefore her evidence for Substrate Agency and for a third Substrate Ontology beyond Technomorphism and biomimesis. The Cognitive Infrastructures paper on organoid intelligence reports the same experiment but calls brains "literally computers", a functionalist framing Tripaldi rejects.