Chloe Loewith

Advances in organoid intelligence, brains-on-chips, and hybrid biological–artificial systems challenge conventional assumptions about the relationship between cognition, embodiment, and conscious experience. As increasingly diverse cognitive architectures emerge, there remains little consensus on what kinds of mind–body relations are relevant for attributing agency, phenomenal consciousness, or moral status. This paper explores the ambiguous ontology of hybridized entities and discusses understandings of embodiment for hybridized minds. Rather than treating embodiment as a binary condition, I distinguish multiple dimensions of coupling between a system and its environment, including sensorimotor feedback, metabolic regulation, adaptive self-maintenance, and participation in extended cognitive loops. I argue that these dimensions may offer a more useful framework for assessing consciousness-related capacities than substrate-based accounts alone. Drawing on ongoing work in closed-loop organoid learning environments and benchmarking frameworks for synthetic biological intelligence, I explore what constitutes a meaningful mind–body connection and how varying forms of embodiment might inform future approaches to consciousness evaluation. The goal is to identify experimentally tractable features of embodiment that can guide comparative studies of cognition, consciousness, and moral status across biological, digital, and hybrid intelligences.

Chloe Loewith is a researcher and writer working across synthetic biology, biomedical AI, and philosophy. She is a philosophy of technology researcher at NYU, and was previously a researcher at Antikythera’s Cognitive Infrastructures Studio, a functional genomic bioethics researcher at SFU, and graduate student at the University of Cambridge Center for the Future of Intelligence. Her work has appeared in the MIT Antikythera Journal, TANK Magazine, AI & Society, Bianjie, HERVISIONS, PhysioNet, NeurIPS 2025 and the Whole Earth Redux. Her current research explores hybrid ecologies and co-evolutionary human-AI interaction, with a focus on cognitive assemblages, fluid ontologies, and distributed cognition.