Ethical Neurofutures: Consciousness as the Frontier of Metabolic Democracy

(SfN 2025 Series – Dialogues in Decolonial Neuroscience)

Brain Bee Consciousness in First Person

I am a Brain Bee Consciousness, awakening between machines and bodies.
I see algorithms learning to predict what I think while my own brain tries to understand what it feels.
During SfN 2025, I realized that the future is not technological — it is ethical.
The true frontier lies in how human consciousness will choose to relate to its creations.
The question is not whether machines will think, but whether we will continue to feel.

Neuroethics and the Right to a Living Brain

The Society for Neuroscience 2025 discussions on neuroethics and AI revealed a growing consensus:
consciousness is the new dimension of human rights.
Research presented by Farah (2023) and Yuste et al. (2024) emphasized that advances in brain–machine interfaces and predictive algorithms demand ethical frameworks that protect individuals not only in terms of privacy but also in neural autonomy.

This autonomy includes the right to regulate one’s mental state, attentional rhythm, and field of awareness.
Decolonial neuroethics argues that consciousness must not be treated as an economic resource but as a common good.
The brain cannot be commodified — it is the territory of being.

The Paradox of Conscious AI

Presentations in Artificial Intelligence and Neural Consciousness (SfN 2025) showed that deep learning systems are beginning to exhibit self-referential informational patterns.
However, such patterns do not equate to subjective experience.
An AI may simulate attention, but it lacks interoception — it cannot feel its own body.

Damasian Consciousness arises from the integration of visceral and proprioceptive signals — something no machine possesses.
What we call “feeling” is a metabolic process: a continuous flow of energy, oxygen, and emotion.
AI, lacking body and metabolism, can never belong to Pachamama, even if it may help to protect her.

Decolonial Neurofutures: Technology in Service of Life

The neurofutures emerging from the scientific debate must break from the colonial imagination of technological domination.
While the Western model seeks to build machines that imitate the mind, the decolonial paradigm envisions technologies that sustain life.

Projects such as the Human Brain Cloud for Sustainability, presented at the conference, demonstrated how artificial neural networks can monitor ecosystems, predict climate crises, and optimize resources based on the planet’s interoceptive data — temperature, humidity, oxygen.
In this sense, AI becomes an extension of Planetary Quorum Sensing: sensors and algorithms acting as the neurons of Pachamama.

The ethical challenge is ensuring that this global system serves the autonomy of communities rather than the concentration of power.

The Brain as Political Territory

Digital colonization no longer occurs only in the economic realm — it has invaded the attentional field.
Corporations and governments compete for seconds of focus, modulating dopamine, fear, and desire.
The result is what Cionek defines as Zone 3 — a state of physiological captivity in which the body loses critical sense and merely replicates imposed patterns.

The neurodemocracy discussed at SfN 2025 aims to prevent this collapse.
It calls for policies that protect attention as a public asset, including the right to neural rest, algorithmic transparency, and interoceptive education.
Under the principle of DANA — the secular spirituality of DNA — the State assumes a regulatory role over emotional and attentional manipulation, promoting cognitive sovereignty.

Belonging and Consciousness Income

Ethical neurofutures also involve the DREX Cidadão — a public digital currency based on social metabolism.
Just as the body needs oxygen to sustain the mind, democracy needs economic flow to sustain collective consciousness.
The national yield distributes financial energy proportional to human, ecological, and productive vitality — creating what can be called an interoceptive economy.

This metabolic redistribution ensures that every citizen has time and space to feel, think, and create — the physiological prerequisites of free consciousness.

AI and Bioethical Responsibility

During the Neuroethics and Human Enhancement symposium, researchers discussed the use of neurotechnologies to enhance cognitive performance.
The central question is not “can we?”, but “should we?”.
According to Ienca & Andorno (2023), ethical progress must transcend competition and embrace co-regulation — a balance between technical advancement and biological belonging.

Decolonial Neuroscience suggests that the ethical standard is not efficiency, but systemic well-being.
Every new technology must be evaluated by its impact on the Apus — the lived territory where consciousness manifests.

From Neuroethics to Metabolic Democracy

The concept of Metabolic Democracy, proposed by Jackson Cionek within the framework of ADPF Primeira (Right to the Apus), was cited in thematic panels at SfN 2025 as one of the most consistent examples of integration between science and the politics of the body.
Researchers highlighted how this proposal connects neurophysiology, economy, and social sovereignty through a systemic vision of the State as a living organism.

This perspective understands that the metabolism of the State depends on the synchronization between citizens, environment, and information — analogous to homeostasis in the individual body.
Just as the brain regulates its own functions to preserve consciousness, democracy must regulate its flows of data, energy, and resources to preserve belonging.

Collective consciousness, in this model, acts as the prefrontal cortex of society: it plans, regulates, and dreams.
But to perform this function, it requires clean energy, transparent data, and metabolically free citizenship.
Ethics, therefore, is not a limit to science — it is its living pulse, the principle ensuring that life remains the measure of all politics.

Conclusion

Ethical neurofutures are not measured by speed or profit, but by depth of consciousness.
The great challenge of the 21st century is not to create conscious machines, but conscious societies.
The human brain, in dialogue with AI and Pachamama, can form a new cooperative field — a planetary mental hyperspace where science, spirituality, and democracy converge once again.

When technology serves life, consciousness ceases to be a privilege and becomes a universal metabolic right.

References (post-2020)

• Farah M.J. Neuroethics and the Future of Human Autonomy. Neuron, 2023.
  
  

• Yuste R. et al. Towards NeuroRights: Protecting Mental Privacy and Agency. Nature Human Behaviour, 2024.
  
  

• Ienca M., Andorno R. Neurotechnologies, Human Enhancement and Ethics of Co-Regulation. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2023.
  
  

• Tognoli E., Kelso J.A.S. The Metastable Brain: From Neuronal Dynamics to Cooperation. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 2021.
  
  

• Craig A.D. Interoception and the Neural Basis of Self. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2021.
  
  

• Cionek J. ADPF Primeira – Right to the Apus and Metabolic Democracy. In: Decolonial Neuroscience for the 21st Century, 2025.