Coined by artist and media researcher Bill Seaman, “neosentience” describes a new branch of scientific inquiry related to artificial intelligence. This volume explores the groundbreaking work of Seaman and theoretical physicist Otto E. Rossler in exploring the potential of an intelligent robotic entity possessed of a form of sentience that ever more closely resembles that of a human being. Individual chapters approach the concept from a range of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and the arts. Neosentience is a burgeoning area of interest, and this book encourages readers to reflect on how we experience and interpret the world, how memory works, and what it is to be human.  

Bill Seaman is professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. Otto E. Rossler is professor of theoretical biochemistry and a chaos researcher at the Institute for Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

A Note from the Authors
Acknowledgements
Foreword

Microchapters:
Introduction—Bridging
Nonlinear
Descartes
Karel Čapek
Roy Ascott—Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision
Neosentience—A New Branch of Scientific and Poetic Inquiry
The N_S.E.N.T.I.E.N.T. Paradigm
Identity—When is it Mine?
A.I. Background
Von Foerster—Circuitry Clues to Platonic Ideation
Von Neumann and the AEC1
The Scale of Computers
Norbert Wiener and Gregory Bateson
Margaret Mead—Cybernetics of Cybernetics
Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory
Macy Conferences
Ross Ashby
Rodney Brooks
Ray Kurzweil
Bill Joy—The Dystopian Position
History and Mythology
Anaximander
Casti’s Emergence
John Holland
Neumannology
Deb Roy
Recursive Evolution
Introduction to the Brian Equation
An Early Computational Approach to “Space”—the Antikythera Mechanism
Pattern Flows
Qualia as Emotional Force Triggers
Color and Chaos
Memory and its Relation to Perception in an N-Dimensional Space
Roger Shepard
Meaning/Becoming
Time
Siegfried Zielinski—Variantology or Archeology of the Media
The Brain Equation
Marvin Minsky
One Now
Global Brain
Xpero and Dörner
(Re)sensing the Observer—Open Order Cybernetics
Deviation-amplifying Mutual Causal Processes
Gödel Boundary Overstepped
Red HoleHole Filled with Light or Color
The Angel of Qualia
The Russell, Bateson, Pavlov Paradox
Bateson—The Double Bind Theory
What is a Question?
Asimo
Asimov’s 3 Laws—Some Observations by Rodney Brooks Concerning the Laws and Reality
Cantor’s Diagonals
Bruno Marchal
Norbert Wiener—Mathematics
The Pattern Game
The World is Not Separate from Us
A Linguistics of Pattern Flows
Computer Code—New Ideas Approaching Relational Pattern Recognition
Michael Arbib
Peirce
Char Davies—VR
The World Generator—Generative VR
The Thoughtbody Environment
Toward an Electrochemical Computer
An Informed Approach to the Creation of an Electrochemical Computer
Gordon Pask—Physical Analogues to the Growth of a Concept
Maverick Machines—Pask
Abduction
Protein Computers—Pask
Pandaka Pygmaea
Self-knowledge—David Finkelstein
Non-two-value Logic
1893—George Moore’s Steam Man
Nonsense logic
Pierce—Ideas Surrounding the First General-purpose Relay Computer
Giulio Camillo (1480-1544)
The Case of the Brains in a Vat—Hilary Putnam
Well-stirred Computers
Ostwald’s Living Fluid
Zeeman—The Construction of a Pseudo Continuum
Well-stirred Life on Jupiter
The Great Everett/Many Branches Theory
Many Worlds/Many Minds
Everett States
The Machine has Perceived A
Many-consciousness Interpretation
The Undivided Universe—An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Theory
The Cut Through the Neosentient
Murray Gell-Mann—The Quark and the Jaguar
The Aharonov-Bohm Effect
Assignment Conditions
The World as Interface
Discreteness and Continuum
Different Definitions of the Observer
Naked Mole Type Intelligence
Special Sense Modalities and Equivalencies Across Minds
Fulguration
High-resolution Magnetic Senses—Hammer Head Shark
Zhuangzi
The Now
Time Buffer—Temporal Fovea
Brian Massumi
Fractal Time
Peter Cariani
The Now Equation
Dreams
Chance is an Element of the Necessary
Gödel Time Machine and the Illusion of Time
Einstein
Non-local Coupling
Cooper Pair
The Body is Simultaneously a Hierarchy and a Heterarchy.
Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot
Simple Languages—Deb Roy
Micro-time Reversal
Edward Fredkin
Seven-level Scheme
Time’s Arrow
Thinking is Physics
Alfred Korzybski—Science and Sanity—New Theory of Language
C. Andy Hilgartner
The Second Force
World Change Techniques
Definitions of Life
Niels Birbaumer
Bell’s Theorem and the Interface Question
Hans Diebner
New Sciences
Reversible Ramifications
Endonomadology—Endomonadology
Kurt Lewin—Topological Psychology
Bonding, Imprinting, and Other Lorenzes—Innate Releasing Mechanisms
Behind the Mirror
Ed Lorenz’s Butterfly
Single-spin Chemistry
Spin-based Computers
Hospitalism
Artificial Ethology/Ethomathematics
Bottom Up vs Top Down
Innate and Acquired Releasing Mechanisms—Priming (Lorenz)
Bonding Drive/Attachment Theory (John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth)
The Invention of Benevolence as a Transcendence of Biology
Natural Brains Artificially Produced
McCulloch and Pitts’ Neural Logical Calculus
Is the Brain a Digital Computer?
Jeff Hawkins—Hierarchical Temporary Memory
James Olds
W.R. Hess
Kurt Gödel
Peter Weibel
Observing Systems (Molecular Ethology)
Douglas Hofstadter
Mirror Neurons/Mirror Competence
A Neural Transmitter for Every Mood—Electrochemical Computers Revisited
Pattern Flows: Notes Toward a Model for an Electrochemical Computer—The Thoughtbody Environment
The Relation of the Body to an Embodied Electrochemical Computer
Synthetic Qualia and Talia Predictably Arise as an Emergent “Inside Quality” of our System
Candice B. Pert—Molecules of Emotion
The MMM Machine
The Physiognomic Side of Nature and its Spatial Relation to the Body
Light Computer
The Elephant Looking into its Own Mouth (J. Plotnik, F. de Waal, and D. Reiss, Courtesy J. Plotnik)
Andy Clark—Mind as Mash-up
Plamen Simeonov
The Creation of a New Techno-species
The Invention of Benevolence
Smile Theory (Don’t Laugh!)
Are We Making an Immortal?
Mary Catherine Bateson Our Own Metaphor
Analogical Computing (Hava T. Siegelmann and Steven Smale)
Analog Chips (Remembering their Ancestry from McCulloch and Pitts)
The World as Interface/Interface as Continuum
Interfaciology
Cooperation in Robotics (Luc Steels)
Games and Seduction
The Science of Charm
What is Second Life?
Avatar
Ingo Rechenberg
Thomas Ray—Tierra
Embodied Souls
Robotic Care Givers
Animals are Behaviorists
Benevolence from a Doll and Animals Brought into Personhood
Expanded Neural Aesthetics/The Aesthetics of Neosentience
Descartes’ Doll
How to Build a Superluminal Computer
Computers Began as People
A Multi-perspective Approach to Understanding That Which is at Operation in the Body Contributing to Thought and Science
Neosentientology
The Articulation of a Bio-mimetic Form of Computation
Neuromorphic Articulation
Vast Complexity
Insight Engine
The Glass Ceiling and the Vertical Breakthrough
Potato Washing
Poly-sensing Potentials
Multimodal Machinic Sensing vs Human Sensing
Related Robotic Projects—Luc Steels
Artificial Seal
Ralph Hollis—Flotor
The Scandal of Benevolence
Leibniz and Benevolence—Delectatio in felicitate alterius
The Benevolence of Cooking
Charm—The Naked Soul
The Scandal of Color
The Physics of Immortality (Everett)
The Thing About the Shared Mind’s Eye (Einstein)
The Omega Point—Jacob, Avicenna, Teilhard
The Jump
The Purring Little White Seal
The Sims by Will Wright
Konrad Lorenz—“Endogenous Mood Pressure”
Play
Arthur Koestler
Wilfried Hou Je Bek
Sex
The Infinite Joy in Music
Ongoing Goals for the Neosentient
Threshold of Personhood
Identification with Color
Long-term Mutation
Neosentience—Positive Techno-evolution or Extreme, Hostile Takeover Environment?
Stephen Smale—Axiom A Attractor
In the Spirit of a Haiku
Wilfried Musterle
David Marr and Tomaso Poggio—Vision System
Sue Savage—Rumbaugh, Roger Lewin and the Soul of the Ape
Buddha
Multiple Approaches to Time and the Now
Death Without a Corpse
Evil as a Contagious Disease
The Seduction Toward the Good
Second Class of Brains
Tenderness
Vannevar Bush’s Differential Analyzer
Kant—The Dreams of a Ghost Seer
Bob Rosen—On Biological Systems as Paradigms for Adaptation
Three Branches of Mathematics
Klaus-Peter Zauner—“Molecular Information Technology”
Howard Pattee—How Does a Molecule Become a Message
Yukio-Pegio GUNJI
Kunihiko KANEKO
One Particular Way of Pattern Matching
The Angel of Redness
All Aesthetics are Neural Aesthetics
Neosentient Aesthetics
Some Reflective Projections on the Internal Screen of the Brain
Kleist
Turing
Dystopian Techno-evolution (continued)
Male Mothers
Fear of an Awesome Responsibility
Spielberg’s Epic A.I.
Post-Darwinian Symbiosis (Lion, Lamb, and Computer)
Turing Test
Bringing up the Computer
Epictetus and the Turing Test
Descartes and the Turing Test
Philip K. Dick’s Empathy Test
Galactic Export
Computational Potentiality
The Physics of Meaning
The Ultrametric Dream—Vladimir Anashin and Andrei Khrennikov’s Robotic Subconscious
The Tale of the Whale
Fighting Evil
Buddha [Smile]
TechnoSpecies
A Model for a Neosentient System—The Benevolence Engine
The Diagram
Poly-sensing Input
Pattern Matching Mechanism
Buffer-generated VR
Force Field Generator
Control Driver: The Great Joystick and the Great Simulator Mechanism (Imagined Space)
Overlap Buffer
Efference Copy/Reafference
Movement Potentials
Long-term Memory
Neosentience
Discussion and Summary
Addendum

Notes
Bibliography