Frontiers | Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds

Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose composition and origin are not like any of the available natural model species. In this Perspective, I introduce TAME—Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere—a framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in unconventional substrates. TAME formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency. TAME provides a natural way to think about animal sentience as an instance of collective intelligence of cell groups, arising from dynamics that manifest in similar ways in numerous other substrates. When applied to regenerating/developmental systems, TAME suggests a perspective on morphogenesis as an example of basal cognition. The deep symmetry between problem-solving in anatomical, physiological, transcriptional, and 3D (traditional behavioral) spaces drives specific hypotheses by which cognitive capacities can increase during evolution. An important medium exploited by evolution for joining active subunits into greater agents is developmental bioelectricity, implemented by pre-neural use of ion channels and gap junctions to scale up cell-le...

;import{g as i,s as o,r as s,e as a,a as u,h as l,b as c,i as h,t as f,c as d,d as p,f as m,j as g,k as y,l as b,K as v,_ as w,S as E,m as _,o as C,w as M,n as S,p as O,q as B,u as D,v as I,x as T,y as x,z as R,A as N,U as k,H as F,B as L,C as P,Y as U,D as j,E as q,F as z,G as $,I as V,J as H,L as W,M as G,N as K,O as Z,P as Y,Q as J,R as X,T as Q,V as AA,W as eA,X as tA,Z as rA,$ as nA,a0 as iA,a1 as oA,a2 as sA,a3 as aA,a4 as uA,a5 as lA,a6 as cA,a7 as hA,a8 as fA,a9 as dA,aa as pA,ab as mA,ac as gA,ad as yA,ae as bA,af as vA,ag as wA,ah as EA,ai as _A,aj as CA,ak as MA,al as SA,am as OA,an

related reading

• [2201.10346] Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME): an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and mindsarxiv.org
• Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds - PMCncbi.nlm.nih.gov
• Frontiers | The Computational Boundary of a “Self”: Developmental Bioelectricity Drives Multicellularity and Scale-Free Cognitionfrontiersin.org
• Mind Everywhere: A Framework for Conceptualizing Goal-Directedness in Biology and Other Domains—Part Onelink.springer.com
• Frontiers | The Past, Present, and Future of Artificial Lifefrontiersin.org
• Homecyborgism.wiki
• Frontiers | Signal Generation, Acquisition, and Processing in Brain Machine Interfaces: A Unified Reviewfrontiersin.org
• Frontiers | Decoding EEG Brain Activity for Multi-Modal Natural Language Processingfrontiersin.org
• Frontiers | The Attention Schema Theory: A Foundation for Engineering Artificial Consciousnessfrontiersin.org
• A Framework for Frontier AI and the Dawning of a New Agedemishassabis.substack.com
• Frontiers | Simulating Emotions: An Active Inference Model of Emotional State Inference and Emotion Concept Learningfrontiersin.org
• Frontiers | Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behaviorfrontiersin.org