Claims about what’s necessary for a system to have cognition and consciousness – such as a brain, or at least neurons -- are increasingly being made by comparative researchers mapping behavioral and psychological traits to phylogeny. Yet necessity claims are hard to square with exceptions (which are common in biology), and they also seem to rule out cognition and consciousness in artificial devices (which seems premature). This project will apply recent work in biological modality to clarify the non-contingency of mind/brain relationships and the limits to functional equivalence between organic substrates and their artificial analogues.