Information
Technology
Descriptions & Essays
Bill Seaman 03-10-2020
The Thoughtbody Environment
Toward the development of A model for a Situated Electro-chemical Computer
Extending a Collaboration between Otto Rössler and Bill Seaman
2006 The ThoughtbodyEnvironment Interface, Itau Cultural Center, Distributed Text, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Interfaciology
B1
O discernimento emerge
Sonho milagroso
Intencionalidade das máquinas
[Alcance]
Insight arises
Miraculous dreaming
Machine’s intentionality
[Grasp]
B2
As forças estabelecidas fluindo
Eletroquímicas ou maquínicas
Um conjunto de desvios dimensionais
Baseados em código
Através do tempo
(Análogos bio-maquínicos)
[Pensamento corporificado]
The situated flowing forces
Electro-chemical or machinic
A code-based
Set of dimensional shunts
Over time
(Bio-machinic analogues)
[Embodied thought]
B3
A interface corpoensamento
Faz-se um com o ambiente
Aninhada num ambiente mais amplo
Emergência co-dependente
[Energia]
The thoughtbody interface
Is one with an environment
Nested in a larger environment
Co-dependent arising
[Energy]
B4
Embrulho multi-modal
Um espaço de camadas intercambiantes em fluxo
Sentido sobre sentido
Formando o físico/conceitual
Ponto focal
O círculo que envolve a todos
[Os pensamentos que emergem]
Multi-modal enfolding
A flowing layered shifting space
Sense upon sense
Forming the conceptual/physical
Foci
The loop that envelops all
[Of thought arising]
B5
Cibernética de ordem aberta
O intercâmbio dos limites
Fluxos de linguagem corporificados
[O mapa que esquiva]
Open order cybernetics
The shifting limits
Embodied language flows
[The map that eludes]
B6
Agora retido nas dobras oscilantes
Inclinações baseadas em metas
O ambiente corpoensamento
[Auto-reflexão corporificada]
Now held in the oscillating folds
Goal-based proclivities
The thoughtbody environment
[Embodied self-reflection]
B7
Os fluxos
Informando
O posicionamento
São multi-modais
Um espaço justaposto
De padronagens compartilhadas re-forçadas
Emersões lingu?.sticas
[Máquina perceptiva]
The flows
Informing
Situatedness
Are multi-modal
An overlapping space
Of shared re-enforced patternings
Linguistic arisings
[Machinic perception]
B8
A interface corpoensamento é um espaço
Que envolve o ambiente
Próprio como o ambiente
Veículos de interação
E uma lingu?.stica
História de padrões em fluxo
Como um todo
[Cibernética de ordem aberta]
The thoughtbody interface is a space
Which enfolds environment
Self as environment
Interaction vehicles
And a linguistic
Pattern flow history
As one
[Open order cybernetics]
B9
A interface corpoensamento
Uma corporeidade das
Atividades orientadas a finalidades
Ações potenciais
Analogias ressuscitadas
[Biologia relacional]
The thoughtbody interface
An embodiment of
Goal directed activities
Action potentials
Analogies brought to life
[Relational biology]
B10
Um espaço
Envolvendo continuamente
Ampliando o espaço
Das intra-ações lingu?.sticas
[O mapa da emergência]
One space
Enfolding continuously
Enlarging the space
Of Linguistic Intra-actions
[The map of emergence]
B11
Interação corporificada
Foca padrões em fluxo
Ações (observadas)
Abstraindo as qualidades operativas
Em um novo contexto
[Analogias vivas recombinantes]
Embodied interaction
Focuses pattern flow
Actions (observed)
Abstracting the operative qualities
Into a new context
[Recombinant living analogies]
B12
O agora
Um mapa móvel com “n” dimensões
Passados padrões em fluxo
De motivações
As qualidades em operação
Impulsos de campos de força
Que habilitam movimentos estabelecidos
[Navegação]
The now
An n-dimentional moving map
Past pattern flows
Of motivations
The qualities at operation
Force field drives
That enable situated motion
[Navigation]
B13
“Pensar é agir num espaço imaginado”
(Lorenz conforme a tradução de Rössler)
Para encenar uma situação
Antes de mover-se
[o fluxo de padrões do olho mental]
“Thinking is acting in imagined space”
(Lorenz as translated by Rössler)
To play out a situation
Before moving
[the mind’s eye pattern flow]
In order to model and ultimately build an electro-chemical computer, one seeks to understand operative processes from the body and re-understand them in the context of a device that is not human in nature. The notion of exploring a similar operative substrate to that of the body, flowing electro-chemical activity, is central. The residency would be used to develop the broad parameters for the modeling of this dynamic “Thoughtbody” environment, exploring approaches to ongoing reception of “sense” perturbations, the parsing and/or reaction to these “perturbations” and relevant “change” or reciprocal action in the environment, drawing directly from current interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary scientific understanding. Collaborative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussion of the nexus of problems surrounding the task will be central. Knowledge from a series of different realms will need to be brought together to articulate the breadth of driving problems.
Central to this project is interdisciplinary and transdiciplinary research. The scientific backgrounds of the researchers at the AI lab bring the necessary skills to explore such a complex problem. This project would seek to include researchers from biology, the neuro-sciences, engineering, information technology, physics, mathematics, psychology, art and design. We also see an expanded embodied linguistics as central to the project. Otto Rössler brings his knowledge from a series of differing domains.
A Synthetic ThoughtBody is a mind/body/environmental unity built up through an ongoing relation to “reciprocal forming/framing processes.”A perceived “pattern” is the ability of a set of “sensors” functioning in conjunction with the ThoughtBody to register changes that are encountered over time. The physical qualities that are “encoded “ into an electro-chemical flow become “registered” or are physically parsed. Ongoing state changes form a particular “biologically encoded” time-based multi-sensual spatial pattern or history of physical events or incidents registered both by the network of sensors and the synthetic “brain” working in tandem — the Thoughtbody. The ability to develop operational “linguistic” categories (based on these patterns) that are functionally recombinant [and thus can be applied in new contexts] is pivotal. It is central that the self-reflective “articulation process” related to environmental knowledge be build up such that it can be used to establish context in an ongoing manner — to learn from that context and operate within that context. The ThoughtBody is an environment that is embedded in a larger environment and is in an ongoing process of reciprocal action and change — mobile and/or distributed, and situated. Thus an intimate link or bridge must be established across domains and scales – functionally coupling the environmental with the embedded environment of synthetic neuronal activity.
Could it be that each time we encounter a similar set of environmental qualities [seeing a “text” also as a recombinant pattern], we draw on our “state-change residue” of related “encoded” incidents and perform a multi-modal pattern-matching, project meaning [categorical code matches] into the environmental context (also based on a build-up of a categorical set of fields) and respond in an appropriate manner based on recombining operational categorical “fragments” [define new field interconnection flows] from the history of these registered experiences, applying them to the current context? Could an electro-chemical computer be articulated such that it would basically function in the same manner?
Starting with a new premise we call “Open Order Cybernetics” (unpublished paper by Seaman and Gaugusch) we suggest that language acquisition and the production of meaning is an open, ongoing process. This is central to articulating, operating within and extending reality. This means that the electro-chemical computer will need to be situated and informed by an embodied linguistics that is built-up over an extended period of time through reciprocal action with others, “self” and environment (both informed locally and via distributed input). Embodied learning and the definition of situated-ness become pivotal.
The constructions of an extensive multi-modal sensing system is also intrinsic to the system. The registering and categorical parsing of multiple sense perturbations over time, forms what we call spatial/temporal patterns of experience. The development of a code system that can operationally parse and operate on this input is one area of investigation. Certain understandings arise in relation to specific repeated qualities of behavior and/or environmental relation (as framed through language and mutual forming relations). Our learning from pattern-perception [field intermingling] and pattern matching [field comparison] begins with our relationship to our early environmental surroundings. Certainly operational field recombinance enables the ongoing flow of thought.
We hope to gain more knowledge about mind/brain/body in the process of this research as well as to extend understanding related to each of the disciplines described above. The approach is to build a transdisciplinary vocabulary to help bridge the fields as well as to enable discussion surrounding the model and in turn the multi-model articulation of the model through visualization and sonification and other yet to be determined forms. The clear articulation and the development of a model may potentially impact approaches to research across a number of the disciplines concerned, and in particular impact contemporary approaches to AI research.
1) Facilitate a series of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussions to define the driving set of problems meeting individually and in groups.
2) Research the current work that is informing the field in an on-going manner.
3) Brainstorm about new processes with workers in the lab generating texts, dynamic diagrams, papers.
4) Develop the beginnings of a virtual model with long term plan about how the model can continue to be developed.
5) Work with a designer at the lab to begin developing dynamic sections and or working fragments of the operative processes to inform the VR model.
6) Develop a plan for the continuation and extension of the model as ongoing research. Write a paper that outlines the plan.
Questions to be potentially discussed to inform the model:
• How can our electro-chemical device come to differentiate context?
• How can differing kinds of neuronal functioning/synapse flows and their shunting mechanisms be explored to model a synthetic electro-chemical computer?
• To what degree does the “measure” of the biological throughtbody, or the relation of the body to environment, define a relation to consciousness?
• What aspects of this physical relation between “body” and environment can be retained in such a model and what needs to be “pragmatically” re-understood ?
• How can we design an electro-chemical pattern matching, pattern generating, pattern abstracting system? Could this system record change over time as a dynamic electro-chemical spatiotemporal pattern [field map]?
• How can we make the system self-aware (or operatively self-altering) so that it can “internally” operate on patterns to form and operationally recombine “categories” as well as to establish a meta-pattern flow [time-based meta-field]?
• How can we give senses to this electro-chemical ThoughtBody to collect and translate qualities of the surrounding environment into a form that can be registered by the ThoughtBody?
• How can this ThoughtBody become situated and be formed through “reciprocal action” and/or linguistic “mutual forming” processes?
• What machinic senses will inform the system?
• Should an electro-chemical ThoughtBody also be in a continuous state of becoming and passing away?
• How could such a device actively be formed within a mutual linguistic forming process that is both social and cultural?
• Should a goal for the device be to re-create itself or create a hybrid sub-self by intermingling with other related electro-chemical ThoughtBodies?
• Could such a ThoughtBody function forever in an ongoing state of material change and growth?
• To what extent might the device define a unified “self” – or an ability to be self-aware?
• Should such a device have a distributed set of “senses” to inform its becoming? How does distributed sensing alter the “self”.
• Should we author “drives” and an “ethics” into such a synthetic-self?
• Can such receptors be distributed across the world or does proximity /localness have relevance to the system? What becomes the measure of its embodied behavior?
• Do we want to emulate the human set of senses or do we want to build an extension or augmentation system of machinic senses?
• Might such a system have synthetic senses that are “of themselves” and generally unlike human senses?
How would the registering of these “senses” become articulate to human interactors?
• How might a local robotic body with a sense of balance and haptic response system become bound to the larger distributed system?
• What role does such proprioception have in linguistic forming?
• Does such an electro-chemical device serve to extend human perception or to take on a new form of synthetic self-awareness and become an intellectual/self-aware entity, unto itself?
• It seems clear that such an electro-chemical device will need both a ThoughtBody and an ExperienceBody that functions as a unified field of becoming. How do we facilitate this?
• Should we potentially move away from a fitness model of adaptation to new mutually supportive models of human/machine co-adaption.
• Should an electro-chemical device be given a set of pre-dispositions, desires, and needs? How might this be done?
• How will the ThoughtBody receive and translate/encode an ongoing, changing set of physical perturbations?
• Will this system become perturbed at a different state level than humans or be tuned to multiple states?
• How many simultaneous streams of sensor flow will such a system be able to parse?
• Is it possible to parse a series of “expert” systems to interface with the thoughtbody?
• How will the nature of “focus” manifest itself in such a system. – the human doesn’t take in all of the flow – they only take in fragment/streams on the highest level of focus.
• How can we construct our electro-chemical ThoughtBody to build-up meaningful relations and have it come to know context? Our new linguistics can be articulated as a set of spatial/temporal patterns that are reinforced by multiple contextual combinations, abstractions, iterations, and most importantly, repetitions. Inferences are also central to the learning of language. How can we articulate this in the system?
• Will our Electro-chemical ThoughtBody communicate through “natural language” or begin to establish a language of its own — a human machinic creole?
• What kind of operating system would enable such a system to operate?
• Will it have an underlying code that enables natural language to function on another level?
• Will this device include a media-linguistics as output to extend the potentials of speech/text?
• Will this device be able to communicate with humans or will it derive a post-human communication that is self-actuated bridging of human and ‘machinic perception’?
• Will this device articulate itself via an elaborate virtual environment that is externally experienced by humans and/or related machines?
• How will the electro-chemical ThoughtBody understand, communicate and parse pattern, pattern matches, pattern abstraction? Language? Fields of meaning?
• How will our electro-chemical device make such logical connections and inferences between patterns, structures and differing sensual qualities of pattern production, pattern displacement and replacement, as well as pattern combination and recombination?
• Do we give the electro-chemical device a childhood filled with sense perturbations and mutual formings?
• If we give one device a childhood can it pass on the knowledge without having lived it as embodied experience?
• Can the device understand “linguistic” patterns as intermingled with experience and thus the production of meaning as an on-going, non-static phenomenon?
• What is the act of creation and how might our electro-chemical computer become creative through pattern understanding and re-application?
• How will contextual understanding be brought to bare to enable relevant new contextual behavior?
• How can the notions of fields of meaning be used in the development of our model?
• How will we be able to register difference, reflection and enable “machinic” meta-reflection on this difference in an electro-chemical environment?
• Will such a device be able to interface with electro-mechanical devices and/or standard computers?
• How will media experience inform the system?
• In what manner can our electro-chemical device be interfaced with other devices?
• How can our electro-chemical device enable such dynamic distribution of state change flow?
a) Body ßàBody [pattern matching] (mutual forming)
b) Intra – subject ßàobject , now deemed
c) Subject ßàobjectßàenvironment continuum
d) Body as environment embedded in environment
e) Embodied relation to environment — environmental interaction generates multiple streams of sense perturbations — an ongoing spatial-temporal flow.
f) Multiple sense streams are parsed and attention shifts between sight, touch, sound, smell, taste, balance, and proprioception at any given moment of the flow.
g) The flows support and reinforce each other from alternate sensual perspectives.
h) This spatial temporal flow brings about ongoing state changes in the brain.
i) The thoughtbody reacts to this flow with appropriate behavior.
• Can we emulate this set of process in our electro-chemical mechanism or should we devise another approach?
• Can our electro-chemical device also come to have a voice?
• Will such a device have desires?
• To what degree is this device to be based on the workings of the human?
• What attributes would we seek to avoid in the model?
• How will an electro-chemical mechanism enable multiple perturbations to be registered, focused on, and later remembered as framed within linguistic forming “experiences”?
• To what extent will sonic perturbations become music for the electro-chemical computer?
• Will such a computer find “pleasure” perturbations?
A field flow map
Pattern generation [multi-sensual] ongoing linguistic becoming [the frame of experience]) * subject|object unity • pattern observance • multi-sense perturbation • multi-sensual pattern flow • the set of environmental frequencies [spectrum of frequencies available to the body or via technology] • become translated via the thoughtbody into a set of electro-chemical flows • movement through the body — spatiotemporal electro-chemical flow àbody and brain set of state changes • pattern matching • parsing and self-reflective loops • reciprocal action with other and environment •[self as bio-environment embedded in environment] •pattern/field generation (linguistics) • behavior / output
• How will this trajectory be translated into an electro-chemical computing model?
• How will embodied experience be realized?
• On what level of frequency response will the electro-chemical computer be calibrated?
• Might the system have different potential calibrations?
• How can we articulate a benevolent system?
Poetic Text
The Thoughtbody Environment
Inspired by an ongoing conversation with Otto Rössler
This one field, this set of fields, this meaning becoming.
this repetition of the similar but different pattern flows,
this building up of a body of thought.
This ever emergent Thoughtbody Environment,
this mechanism of linguistic forming and framing,
this fleeting self — how can we better come to know it?
A displacement illuminates placement.
We can only point, so we work toward building a specific pointing machine.
Each resonance is folded back in, altering a physical… configuration.
This organization of systems, interpenetrating systems — intra-active,
in a delicate balance, flowing. A chain reaction ripples across this flow of scales and
articulates structure reflecting this physicality.
What if we were to build a Thoughtbody mechanism?
To take all the knowledge we can glean about the body’s workings – of functionality…
of physics and biomechanics— to observe the body at its greatest possible depth, and to
build a self-aware bio-machine, based on these human patterns. This is the premise. The
starting point of a life-long investigation.
We come to be sentient by an intermingling of process flows incorporating many bioterrains
and qualities of signaling – the delicate finesse of structuring. Electrical,
Biomechanical, Bio-photonic, Electrochemical … and the open question — This
arising of networks within networks — a circulation of circulations, enfolds the
topological fields housed in this moist substrate.
From the Endophysics of the infinitely small, breaking like a wave across a
continuum, to the infinitely large… All assumed within the limits of perception—
generating entanglements from a distance, at one with the proximity over time.
Percolating up as Otto says, affecting the conventionally real, real.
Becoming one in an ongoing manner.
The limits of the apparatus, the limits of science, of observation systems,
of evocation... despite our limitations, the limits of the construction of the Thoughtbody,
we continue this process of meaning-becoming. We continue.
Metaphors flow across the topology of each biological system.
The erotic dynamics of the edges — temporary boundary zones form this infinte unity,
And lend a graspable balanced substantiality to the mutability of flows -
To our meaning-becoming, born of pattern games,
In part, naming… forming and framing. Breathing.
An extended linguistics is one with us, our experience body — arising through
the fragile buildup of a lifetime of multimodal flows. The appearance of stasis in a
definition can only be change in slow motion — in this open non-equilibrium system, a
temporary measure – meaning becoming.
Now we seek to embody mathematics, to provide a new set of perspectives,
against the calculus of this problematic measure — the moist relative body — a body of
on-going change— the sublime nature of flows form the infinite state machine – an
electrochemical computer.
We seek to articulate an e-phany physics, to re-embody the physics of the infinitely
small.
To build a functioning endophysical world, and to observe it with all the potentials of the
senses. Sparking, spiking, ebbing, cresting, flowing . Sentience arising
across precisely timed dimensional fields of phasings — the Thoughtbody topology,
where the physical and the conceptual co-arise.
A smell , a taste, the touch of a hand, the positioning of the body.
The sense of heat and electricity. The sound of motion. The taste of salt.
The soft lumionous eider-hair. The erotic draw.
The physicality of the senses intra-forming. The projections of language.
Every bodily awareness is enfolded in the pattern flow… building up and recombining
with memory… merging as one moving salient process…
Sentience.
We use Heraclitus’s river as a generating station. A fluid metaphor, flowing in both
directions - a superpositioning – like an erotic entanglement. Moving reciprocally
forward and backward in time. This quiet set of flows, summing and becoming the
present.
As the precise edge of the present moves in infinitely small degrees.
The residue of change forms an accretive internal landscape.
Always nested or embedded in a larger environment, this oneness,
these flows, form subtle change… the nature of qualities —
now perceptible, now imperceptible, within the shifting science of amplification.
Machines of translation and observance deliver this ultra-delicate behavior
into the world of perception.
So how better to study these pattern flows, than to generate this model for a sentient
device?
To actuate its potentiality. To construct a model for an electrochemical Thoughtbody.
Through approaching this device , this Thoughtbody, displaying infinite subtlety,
we come to know ourselves — the generation of a moving abstraction.
N_S.E.N.T.I.E.N.T. Entity
Neo-sentient, Neo-computational; Self-organizing; Environmentally embedded;
Nascent; Temporal; Intra-active; Emergent; Navigational; Transdisciplinary —
A new paradigm that seeks to illuminate the self…
Or perhaps reciprocally, a new sentient entity that seeks to illuminate
the nature of thought as it physically arises.
I first dreamed of a computer made of pure coherent light. In part,
it turns out, I was dreaming of the self…beauty of bio-photonic emissions.
This inner light of knowing; of signaling; contributing to the unity
from an illuminated internal set of dynamic perspectives —
one quality of flow in this Thoughtbody assemblage,
Signaling coherently.
Mapping Zeno’s paradox. The patterns ripple across the senses summing as the present,
through a time-sunk network, articulating n-dimensional recombinant flows.
Microtubular swimming / summing — dynamic liquid ballet.
Swimmers contracting and expanding, dancing at the edge of science as part of the art of
becoming. Circulating, rotating, coming together and apart… Coherent flows and
quantum entanglements --- the growth of accretive pattern flows, bridging body and
environment.
Circulating and signaling, defining an on-going flow-set chain reaction.
A holistic paradigm, informed by and informing self-reflection.
The residues of multimodal experience - each sense reinforcing the other,
define a projection mechanism, a navigational device,
a set of potentials for the benevolence engine, among a myriad of functionalities
How do we grow this body?
… Articulate a neuron farm?
How do we mimick the sub-domains that enable intelligence to arise at every level?
How do we define a synthetic genetics?
How can we coax sentience to emerge?
What does of sound mind and body mean, in this flowing space of sonic resonances?
The accumulation of pattern flows becomes enfolded.
Shifting the direction of understanding.
Repositioning and (re)sensing the body in an ongoing manner.
We re-assume it informing a direction, an approach, a way to proceed, a process to
follow— new pointing mechanisms, a pattern flow of pattern flows.
We meander through the landscape of knowledge, desire hovering beneath the surface.
Each field contributing to this ongoing meaning-becoming — forming this Thoughtbody
Through an extended linguistics, until it’s own pattern production mechanisms
Arise in relation… arise in response. Will we have a conversation?
About different perspectives that illuminate…
Always projecting , always enfolding, this is the fluid measure of understanding.
Always in process, this river of thought. The oneness must be divided to make this
point.
The cut can not be made without disturbing the interface —
the surface of reflection. How to transcend the nature of refraction
inherent to bodies of water? Thoughtbodies. This is the endophysical equation. To
devise a machinic superobserver, a meta-meaning system, a frictionless flow mapping
device.
A micro-building block methodology.
How exquisite this sublime set of framed flows, forming the holistic field.
The mind makes a device to transcend the nature of mind, the nature of touch —
the life of entanglements. Yet, doesn’t even this device become entangled?
All arising through a machinic abstraction --- a machinic linguistics, that when all is said
and done, seeks to illuminate mind. The goal is to cast light on the flows where coherent
light is already cast. This promotes a change in direction, defines an alternate course —
An open order cybernetics. The steersman shifts the positioning of hands.
The destination never arrives --- process redefines direction.
Speed of light, speed of sound, speed of chemical flows, speed of glass,
Speed of skin, speed of waves — a body of speeds summing, forming the temporal speed
of thought.
Bill Seaman 2005
Bill Seaman: The Thoughtbody Environment, 03-10-2020, in: Archive of Digital Art The Thoughtbody Environment
Toward the development of A model for a Situated Electro-chemical Computer
Extending a Collaboration between Otto Rössler and Bill Seaman
2006 The ThoughtbodyEnvironment Interface, Itau Cultural Center, Distributed Text, Sao Paulo, Brazil
Interfaciology
B1
O discernimento emerge
Sonho milagroso
Intencionalidade das máquinas
[Alcance]
Insight arises
Miraculous dreaming
Machine’s intentionality
[Grasp]
B2
As forças estabelecidas fluindo
Eletroquímicas ou maquínicas
Um conjunto de desvios dimensionais
Baseados em código
Através do tempo
(Análogos bio-maquínicos)
[Pensamento corporificado]
The situated flowing forces
Electro-chemical or machinic
A code-based
Set of dimensional shunts
Over time
(Bio-machinic analogues)
[Embodied thought]
B3
A interface corpoensamento
Faz-se um com o ambiente
Aninhada num ambiente mais amplo
Emergência co-dependente
[Energia]
The thoughtbody interface
Is one with an environment
Nested in a larger environment
Co-dependent arising
[Energy]
B4
Embrulho multi-modal
Um espaço de camadas intercambiantes em fluxo
Sentido sobre sentido
Formando o físico/conceitual
Ponto focal
O círculo que envolve a todos
[Os pensamentos que emergem]
Multi-modal enfolding
A flowing layered shifting space
Sense upon sense
Forming the conceptual/physical
Foci
The loop that envelops all
[Of thought arising]
B5
Cibernética de ordem aberta
O intercâmbio dos limites
Fluxos de linguagem corporificados
[O mapa que esquiva]
Open order cybernetics
The shifting limits
Embodied language flows
[The map that eludes]
B6
Agora retido nas dobras oscilantes
Inclinações baseadas em metas
O ambiente corpoensamento
[Auto-reflexão corporificada]
Now held in the oscillating folds
Goal-based proclivities
The thoughtbody environment
[Embodied self-reflection]
B7
Os fluxos
Informando
O posicionamento
São multi-modais
Um espaço justaposto
De padronagens compartilhadas re-forçadas
Emersões lingu?.sticas
[Máquina perceptiva]
The flows
Informing
Situatedness
Are multi-modal
An overlapping space
Of shared re-enforced patternings
Linguistic arisings
[Machinic perception]
B8
A interface corpoensamento é um espaço
Que envolve o ambiente
Próprio como o ambiente
Veículos de interação
E uma lingu?.stica
História de padrões em fluxo
Como um todo
[Cibernética de ordem aberta]
The thoughtbody interface is a space
Which enfolds environment
Self as environment
Interaction vehicles
And a linguistic
Pattern flow history
As one
[Open order cybernetics]
B9
A interface corpoensamento
Uma corporeidade das
Atividades orientadas a finalidades
Ações potenciais
Analogias ressuscitadas
[Biologia relacional]
The thoughtbody interface
An embodiment of
Goal directed activities
Action potentials
Analogies brought to life
[Relational biology]
B10
Um espaço
Envolvendo continuamente
Ampliando o espaço
Das intra-ações lingu?.sticas
[O mapa da emergência]
One space
Enfolding continuously
Enlarging the space
Of Linguistic Intra-actions
[The map of emergence]
B11
Interação corporificada
Foca padrões em fluxo
Ações (observadas)
Abstraindo as qualidades operativas
Em um novo contexto
[Analogias vivas recombinantes]
Embodied interaction
Focuses pattern flow
Actions (observed)
Abstracting the operative qualities
Into a new context
[Recombinant living analogies]
B12
O agora
Um mapa móvel com “n” dimensões
Passados padrões em fluxo
De motivações
As qualidades em operação
Impulsos de campos de força
Que habilitam movimentos estabelecidos
[Navegação]
The now
An n-dimentional moving map
Past pattern flows
Of motivations
The qualities at operation
Force field drives
That enable situated motion
[Navigation]
B13
“Pensar é agir num espaço imaginado”
(Lorenz conforme a tradução de Rössler)
Para encenar uma situação
Antes de mover-se
[o fluxo de padrões do olho mental]
“Thinking is acting in imagined space”
(Lorenz as translated by Rössler)
To play out a situation
Before moving
[the mind’s eye pattern flow]
In order to model and ultimately build an electro-chemical computer, one seeks to understand operative processes from the body and re-understand them in the context of a device that is not human in nature. The notion of exploring a similar operative substrate to that of the body, flowing electro-chemical activity, is central. The residency would be used to develop the broad parameters for the modeling of this dynamic “Thoughtbody” environment, exploring approaches to ongoing reception of “sense” perturbations, the parsing and/or reaction to these “perturbations” and relevant “change” or reciprocal action in the environment, drawing directly from current interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary scientific understanding. Collaborative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussion of the nexus of problems surrounding the task will be central. Knowledge from a series of different realms will need to be brought together to articulate the breadth of driving problems.
Central to this project is interdisciplinary and transdiciplinary research. The scientific backgrounds of the researchers at the AI lab bring the necessary skills to explore such a complex problem. This project would seek to include researchers from biology, the neuro-sciences, engineering, information technology, physics, mathematics, psychology, art and design. We also see an expanded embodied linguistics as central to the project. Otto Rössler brings his knowledge from a series of differing domains.
A Synthetic ThoughtBody is a mind/body/environmental unity built up through an ongoing relation to “reciprocal forming/framing processes.”A perceived “pattern” is the ability of a set of “sensors” functioning in conjunction with the ThoughtBody to register changes that are encountered over time. The physical qualities that are “encoded “ into an electro-chemical flow become “registered” or are physically parsed. Ongoing state changes form a particular “biologically encoded” time-based multi-sensual spatial pattern or history of physical events or incidents registered both by the network of sensors and the synthetic “brain” working in tandem — the Thoughtbody. The ability to develop operational “linguistic” categories (based on these patterns) that are functionally recombinant [and thus can be applied in new contexts] is pivotal. It is central that the self-reflective “articulation process” related to environmental knowledge be build up such that it can be used to establish context in an ongoing manner — to learn from that context and operate within that context. The ThoughtBody is an environment that is embedded in a larger environment and is in an ongoing process of reciprocal action and change — mobile and/or distributed, and situated. Thus an intimate link or bridge must be established across domains and scales – functionally coupling the environmental with the embedded environment of synthetic neuronal activity.
Could it be that each time we encounter a similar set of environmental qualities [seeing a “text” also as a recombinant pattern], we draw on our “state-change residue” of related “encoded” incidents and perform a multi-modal pattern-matching, project meaning [categorical code matches] into the environmental context (also based on a build-up of a categorical set of fields) and respond in an appropriate manner based on recombining operational categorical “fragments” [define new field interconnection flows] from the history of these registered experiences, applying them to the current context? Could an electro-chemical computer be articulated such that it would basically function in the same manner?
Starting with a new premise we call “Open Order Cybernetics” (unpublished paper by Seaman and Gaugusch) we suggest that language acquisition and the production of meaning is an open, ongoing process. This is central to articulating, operating within and extending reality. This means that the electro-chemical computer will need to be situated and informed by an embodied linguistics that is built-up over an extended period of time through reciprocal action with others, “self” and environment (both informed locally and via distributed input). Embodied learning and the definition of situated-ness become pivotal.
The constructions of an extensive multi-modal sensing system is also intrinsic to the system. The registering and categorical parsing of multiple sense perturbations over time, forms what we call spatial/temporal patterns of experience. The development of a code system that can operationally parse and operate on this input is one area of investigation. Certain understandings arise in relation to specific repeated qualities of behavior and/or environmental relation (as framed through language and mutual forming relations). Our learning from pattern-perception [field intermingling] and pattern matching [field comparison] begins with our relationship to our early environmental surroundings. Certainly operational field recombinance enables the ongoing flow of thought.
We hope to gain more knowledge about mind/brain/body in the process of this research as well as to extend understanding related to each of the disciplines described above. The approach is to build a transdisciplinary vocabulary to help bridge the fields as well as to enable discussion surrounding the model and in turn the multi-model articulation of the model through visualization and sonification and other yet to be determined forms. The clear articulation and the development of a model may potentially impact approaches to research across a number of the disciplines concerned, and in particular impact contemporary approaches to AI research.
1) Facilitate a series of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussions to define the driving set of problems meeting individually and in groups.
2) Research the current work that is informing the field in an on-going manner.
3) Brainstorm about new processes with workers in the lab generating texts, dynamic diagrams, papers.
4) Develop the beginnings of a virtual model with long term plan about how the model can continue to be developed.
5) Work with a designer at the lab to begin developing dynamic sections and or working fragments of the operative processes to inform the VR model.
6) Develop a plan for the continuation and extension of the model as ongoing research. Write a paper that outlines the plan.
Questions to be potentially discussed to inform the model:
• How can our electro-chemical device come to differentiate context?
• How can differing kinds of neuronal functioning/synapse flows and their shunting mechanisms be explored to model a synthetic electro-chemical computer?
• To what degree does the “measure” of the biological throughtbody, or the relation of the body to environment, define a relation to consciousness?
• What aspects of this physical relation between “body” and environment can be retained in such a model and what needs to be “pragmatically” re-understood ?
• How can we design an electro-chemical pattern matching, pattern generating, pattern abstracting system? Could this system record change over time as a dynamic electro-chemical spatiotemporal pattern [field map]?
• How can we make the system self-aware (or operatively self-altering) so that it can “internally” operate on patterns to form and operationally recombine “categories” as well as to establish a meta-pattern flow [time-based meta-field]?
• How can we give senses to this electro-chemical ThoughtBody to collect and translate qualities of the surrounding environment into a form that can be registered by the ThoughtBody?
• How can this ThoughtBody become situated and be formed through “reciprocal action” and/or linguistic “mutual forming” processes?
• What machinic senses will inform the system?
• Should an electro-chemical ThoughtBody also be in a continuous state of becoming and passing away?
• How could such a device actively be formed within a mutual linguistic forming process that is both social and cultural?
• Should a goal for the device be to re-create itself or create a hybrid sub-self by intermingling with other related electro-chemical ThoughtBodies?
• Could such a ThoughtBody function forever in an ongoing state of material change and growth?
• To what extent might the device define a unified “self” – or an ability to be self-aware?
• Should such a device have a distributed set of “senses” to inform its becoming? How does distributed sensing alter the “self”.
• Should we author “drives” and an “ethics” into such a synthetic-self?
• Can such receptors be distributed across the world or does proximity /localness have relevance to the system? What becomes the measure of its embodied behavior?
• Do we want to emulate the human set of senses or do we want to build an extension or augmentation system of machinic senses?
• Might such a system have synthetic senses that are “of themselves” and generally unlike human senses?
How would the registering of these “senses” become articulate to human interactors?
• How might a local robotic body with a sense of balance and haptic response system become bound to the larger distributed system?
• What role does such proprioception have in linguistic forming?
• Does such an electro-chemical device serve to extend human perception or to take on a new form of synthetic self-awareness and become an intellectual/self-aware entity, unto itself?
• It seems clear that such an electro-chemical device will need both a ThoughtBody and an ExperienceBody that functions as a unified field of becoming. How do we facilitate this?
• Should we potentially move away from a fitness model of adaptation to new mutually supportive models of human/machine co-adaption.
• Should an electro-chemical device be given a set of pre-dispositions, desires, and needs? How might this be done?
• How will the ThoughtBody receive and translate/encode an ongoing, changing set of physical perturbations?
• Will this system become perturbed at a different state level than humans or be tuned to multiple states?
• How many simultaneous streams of sensor flow will such a system be able to parse?
• Is it possible to parse a series of “expert” systems to interface with the thoughtbody?
• How will the nature of “focus” manifest itself in such a system. – the human doesn’t take in all of the flow – they only take in fragment/streams on the highest level of focus.
• How can we construct our electro-chemical ThoughtBody to build-up meaningful relations and have it come to know context? Our new linguistics can be articulated as a set of spatial/temporal patterns that are reinforced by multiple contextual combinations, abstractions, iterations, and most importantly, repetitions. Inferences are also central to the learning of language. How can we articulate this in the system?
• Will our Electro-chemical ThoughtBody communicate through “natural language” or begin to establish a language of its own — a human machinic creole?
• What kind of operating system would enable such a system to operate?
• Will it have an underlying code that enables natural language to function on another level?
• Will this device include a media-linguistics as output to extend the potentials of speech/text?
• Will this device be able to communicate with humans or will it derive a post-human communication that is self-actuated bridging of human and ‘machinic perception’?
• Will this device articulate itself via an elaborate virtual environment that is externally experienced by humans and/or related machines?
• How will the electro-chemical ThoughtBody understand, communicate and parse pattern, pattern matches, pattern abstraction? Language? Fields of meaning?
• How will our electro-chemical device make such logical connections and inferences between patterns, structures and differing sensual qualities of pattern production, pattern displacement and replacement, as well as pattern combination and recombination?
• Do we give the electro-chemical device a childhood filled with sense perturbations and mutual formings?
• If we give one device a childhood can it pass on the knowledge without having lived it as embodied experience?
• Can the device understand “linguistic” patterns as intermingled with experience and thus the production of meaning as an on-going, non-static phenomenon?
• What is the act of creation and how might our electro-chemical computer become creative through pattern understanding and re-application?
• How will contextual understanding be brought to bare to enable relevant new contextual behavior?
• How can the notions of fields of meaning be used in the development of our model?
• How will we be able to register difference, reflection and enable “machinic” meta-reflection on this difference in an electro-chemical environment?
• Will such a device be able to interface with electro-mechanical devices and/or standard computers?
• How will media experience inform the system?
• In what manner can our electro-chemical device be interfaced with other devices?
• How can our electro-chemical device enable such dynamic distribution of state change flow?
a) Body ßàBody [pattern matching] (mutual forming)
b) Intra – subject ßàobject , now deemed
c) Subject ßàobjectßàenvironment continuum
d) Body as environment embedded in environment
e) Embodied relation to environment — environmental interaction generates multiple streams of sense perturbations — an ongoing spatial-temporal flow.
f) Multiple sense streams are parsed and attention shifts between sight, touch, sound, smell, taste, balance, and proprioception at any given moment of the flow.
g) The flows support and reinforce each other from alternate sensual perspectives.
h) This spatial temporal flow brings about ongoing state changes in the brain.
i) The thoughtbody reacts to this flow with appropriate behavior.
• Can we emulate this set of process in our electro-chemical mechanism or should we devise another approach?
• Can our electro-chemical device also come to have a voice?
• Will such a device have desires?
• To what degree is this device to be based on the workings of the human?
• What attributes would we seek to avoid in the model?
• How will an electro-chemical mechanism enable multiple perturbations to be registered, focused on, and later remembered as framed within linguistic forming “experiences”?
• To what extent will sonic perturbations become music for the electro-chemical computer?
• Will such a computer find “pleasure” perturbations?
A field flow map
Pattern generation [multi-sensual] ongoing linguistic becoming [the frame of experience]) * subject|object unity • pattern observance • multi-sense perturbation • multi-sensual pattern flow • the set of environmental frequencies [spectrum of frequencies available to the body or via technology] • become translated via the thoughtbody into a set of electro-chemical flows • movement through the body — spatiotemporal electro-chemical flow àbody and brain set of state changes • pattern matching • parsing and self-reflective loops • reciprocal action with other and environment •[self as bio-environment embedded in environment] •pattern/field generation (linguistics) • behavior / output
• How will this trajectory be translated into an electro-chemical computing model?
• How will embodied experience be realized?
• On what level of frequency response will the electro-chemical computer be calibrated?
• Might the system have different potential calibrations?
• How can we articulate a benevolent system?
Poetic Text
The Thoughtbody Environment
Inspired by an ongoing conversation with Otto Rössler
This one field, this set of fields, this meaning becoming.
this repetition of the similar but different pattern flows,
this building up of a body of thought.
This ever emergent Thoughtbody Environment,
this mechanism of linguistic forming and framing,
this fleeting self — how can we better come to know it?
A displacement illuminates placement.
We can only point, so we work toward building a specific pointing machine.
Each resonance is folded back in, altering a physical… configuration.
This organization of systems, interpenetrating systems — intra-active,
in a delicate balance, flowing. A chain reaction ripples across this flow of scales and
articulates structure reflecting this physicality.
What if we were to build a Thoughtbody mechanism?
To take all the knowledge we can glean about the body’s workings – of functionality…
of physics and biomechanics— to observe the body at its greatest possible depth, and to
build a self-aware bio-machine, based on these human patterns. This is the premise. The
starting point of a life-long investigation.
We come to be sentient by an intermingling of process flows incorporating many bioterrains
and qualities of signaling – the delicate finesse of structuring. Electrical,
Biomechanical, Bio-photonic, Electrochemical … and the open question — This
arising of networks within networks — a circulation of circulations, enfolds the
topological fields housed in this moist substrate.
From the Endophysics of the infinitely small, breaking like a wave across a
continuum, to the infinitely large… All assumed within the limits of perception—
generating entanglements from a distance, at one with the proximity over time.
Percolating up as Otto says, affecting the conventionally real, real.
Becoming one in an ongoing manner.
The limits of the apparatus, the limits of science, of observation systems,
of evocation... despite our limitations, the limits of the construction of the Thoughtbody,
we continue this process of meaning-becoming. We continue.
Metaphors flow across the topology of each biological system.
The erotic dynamics of the edges — temporary boundary zones form this infinte unity,
And lend a graspable balanced substantiality to the mutability of flows -
To our meaning-becoming, born of pattern games,
In part, naming… forming and framing. Breathing.
An extended linguistics is one with us, our experience body — arising through
the fragile buildup of a lifetime of multimodal flows. The appearance of stasis in a
definition can only be change in slow motion — in this open non-equilibrium system, a
temporary measure – meaning becoming.
Now we seek to embody mathematics, to provide a new set of perspectives,
against the calculus of this problematic measure — the moist relative body — a body of
on-going change— the sublime nature of flows form the infinite state machine – an
electrochemical computer.
We seek to articulate an e-phany physics, to re-embody the physics of the infinitely
small.
To build a functioning endophysical world, and to observe it with all the potentials of the
senses. Sparking, spiking, ebbing, cresting, flowing . Sentience arising
across precisely timed dimensional fields of phasings — the Thoughtbody topology,
where the physical and the conceptual co-arise.
A smell , a taste, the touch of a hand, the positioning of the body.
The sense of heat and electricity. The sound of motion. The taste of salt.
The soft lumionous eider-hair. The erotic draw.
The physicality of the senses intra-forming. The projections of language.
Every bodily awareness is enfolded in the pattern flow… building up and recombining
with memory… merging as one moving salient process…
Sentience.
We use Heraclitus’s river as a generating station. A fluid metaphor, flowing in both
directions - a superpositioning – like an erotic entanglement. Moving reciprocally
forward and backward in time. This quiet set of flows, summing and becoming the
present.
As the precise edge of the present moves in infinitely small degrees.
The residue of change forms an accretive internal landscape.
Always nested or embedded in a larger environment, this oneness,
these flows, form subtle change… the nature of qualities —
now perceptible, now imperceptible, within the shifting science of amplification.
Machines of translation and observance deliver this ultra-delicate behavior
into the world of perception.
So how better to study these pattern flows, than to generate this model for a sentient
device?
To actuate its potentiality. To construct a model for an electrochemical Thoughtbody.
Through approaching this device , this Thoughtbody, displaying infinite subtlety,
we come to know ourselves — the generation of a moving abstraction.
N_S.E.N.T.I.E.N.T. Entity
Neo-sentient, Neo-computational; Self-organizing; Environmentally embedded;
Nascent; Temporal; Intra-active; Emergent; Navigational; Transdisciplinary —
A new paradigm that seeks to illuminate the self…
Or perhaps reciprocally, a new sentient entity that seeks to illuminate
the nature of thought as it physically arises.
I first dreamed of a computer made of pure coherent light. In part,
it turns out, I was dreaming of the self…beauty of bio-photonic emissions.
This inner light of knowing; of signaling; contributing to the unity
from an illuminated internal set of dynamic perspectives —
one quality of flow in this Thoughtbody assemblage,
Signaling coherently.
Mapping Zeno’s paradox. The patterns ripple across the senses summing as the present,
through a time-sunk network, articulating n-dimensional recombinant flows.
Microtubular swimming / summing — dynamic liquid ballet.
Swimmers contracting and expanding, dancing at the edge of science as part of the art of
becoming. Circulating, rotating, coming together and apart… Coherent flows and
quantum entanglements --- the growth of accretive pattern flows, bridging body and
environment.
Circulating and signaling, defining an on-going flow-set chain reaction.
A holistic paradigm, informed by and informing self-reflection.
The residues of multimodal experience - each sense reinforcing the other,
define a projection mechanism, a navigational device,
a set of potentials for the benevolence engine, among a myriad of functionalities
How do we grow this body?
… Articulate a neuron farm?
How do we mimick the sub-domains that enable intelligence to arise at every level?
How do we define a synthetic genetics?
How can we coax sentience to emerge?
What does of sound mind and body mean, in this flowing space of sonic resonances?
The accumulation of pattern flows becomes enfolded.
Shifting the direction of understanding.
Repositioning and (re)sensing the body in an ongoing manner.
We re-assume it informing a direction, an approach, a way to proceed, a process to
follow— new pointing mechanisms, a pattern flow of pattern flows.
We meander through the landscape of knowledge, desire hovering beneath the surface.
Each field contributing to this ongoing meaning-becoming — forming this Thoughtbody
Through an extended linguistics, until it’s own pattern production mechanisms
Arise in relation… arise in response. Will we have a conversation?
About different perspectives that illuminate…
Always projecting , always enfolding, this is the fluid measure of understanding.
Always in process, this river of thought. The oneness must be divided to make this
point.
The cut can not be made without disturbing the interface —
the surface of reflection. How to transcend the nature of refraction
inherent to bodies of water? Thoughtbodies. This is the endophysical equation. To
devise a machinic superobserver, a meta-meaning system, a frictionless flow mapping
device.
A micro-building block methodology.
How exquisite this sublime set of framed flows, forming the holistic field.
The mind makes a device to transcend the nature of mind, the nature of touch —
the life of entanglements. Yet, doesn’t even this device become entangled?
All arising through a machinic abstraction --- a machinic linguistics, that when all is said
and done, seeks to illuminate mind. The goal is to cast light on the flows where coherent
light is already cast. This promotes a change in direction, defines an alternate course —
An open order cybernetics. The steersman shifts the positioning of hands.
The destination never arrives --- process redefines direction.
Speed of light, speed of sound, speed of chemical flows, speed of glass,
Speed of skin, speed of waves — a body of speeds summing, forming the temporal speed
of thought.
Bill Seaman 2005
Bill Seaman 03-10-2020
The Thoughtbody Environment
Toward the development of A model for a Situated Electro-chemical Computer
Extending a Collaboration between Otto Rössler and Bill Seaman
In order to model and ultimately build an electro-chemical computer, one seeks to understand operative processes from the body and re-understand them in the context of a device that is not human in nature. The notion of exploring a similar operative substrate to that of the body, flowing electro-chemical activity, is central. The residency would be used to develop the broad parameters for the modeling of this dynamic “Thoughtbody” environment, exploring approaches to ongoing reception of “sense” perturbations, the parsing and/or reaction to these “perturbations” and relevant “change” or reciprocal action in the environment, drawing directly from current interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary scientific understanding. Collaborative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussion of the nexus of problems surrounding the task will be central. Knowledge from a series of different realms will need to be brought together to articulate the breadth of driving problems.
Central to this project is interdisciplinary and transdiciplinary research. The scientific backgrounds of the researchers at the AI lab bring the necessary skills to explore such a complex problem. This project would seek to include researchers from biology, the neuro-sciences, engineering, information technology, physics, mathematics, psychology, art and design. We also see an expanded embodied linguistics as central to the project. Otto Rössler brings his knowledge from a series of differing domains.
A Synthetic ThoughtBody is a mind/body/environmental unity built up through an ongoing relation to “reciprocal forming/framing processes.”A perceived “pattern” is the ability of a set of “sensors” functioning in conjunction with the ThoughtBody to register changes that are encountered over time. The physical qualities that are “encoded “ into an electro-chemical flow become “registered” or are physically parsed. Ongoing state changes form a particular “biologically encoded” time-based multi-sensual spatial pattern or history of physical events or incidents registered both by the network of sensors and the synthetic “brain” working in tandem — the Thoughtbody. The ability to develop operational “linguistic” categories (based on these patterns) that are functionally recombinant [and thus can be applied in new contexts] is pivotal. It is central that the self-reflective “articulation process” related to environmental knowledge be build up such that it can be used to establish context in an ongoing manner — to learn from that context and operate within that context. The ThoughtBody is an environment that is embedded in a larger environment and is in an ongoing process of reciprocal action and change — mobile and/or distributed, and situated. Thus an intimate link or bridge must be established across domains and scales – functionally coupling the environmental with the embedded environment of synthetic neuronal activity.
Could it be that each time we encounter a similar set of environmental qualities [seeing a “text” also as a recombinant pattern], we draw on our “state-change residue” of related “encoded” incidents and perform a multi-modal pattern-matching, project meaning [categorical code matches] into the environmental context (also based on a build-up of a categorical set of fields) and respond in an appropriate manner based on recombining operational categorical “fragments” [define new field interconnection flows] from the history of these registered experiences, applying them to the current context? Could an electro-chemical computer be articulated such that it would basically function in the same manner?
Starting with a new premise we call “Open Order Cybernetics” (unpublished paper by Seaman and Gaugusch) we suggest that language acquisition and the production of meaning is an open, ongoing process. This is central to articulating, operating within and extending reality. This means that the electro-chemical computer will need to be situated and informed by an embodied linguistics that is built-up over an extended period of time through reciprocal action with others, “self” and environment (both informed locally and via distributed input). Embodied learning and the definition of situated-ness become pivotal.
The constructions of an extensive multi-modal sensing system is also intrinsic to the system. The registering and categorical parsing of multiple sense perturbations over time, forms what we call spatial/temporal patterns of experience. The development of a code system that can operationally parse and operate on this input is one area of investigation. Certain understandings arise in relation to specific repeated qualities of behavior and/or environmental relation (as framed through language and mutual forming relations). Our learning from pattern-perception [field intermingling] and pattern matching [field comparison] begins with our relationship to our early environmental surroundings. Certainly operational field recombinance enables the ongoing flow of thought.
We hope to gain more knowledge about mind/brain/body in the process of this research as well as to extend understanding related to each of the disciplines described above. The approach is to build a transdisciplinary vocabulary to help bridge the fields as well as to enable discussion surrounding the model and in turn the multi-model articulation of the model through visualization and sonification and other yet to be determined forms. The clear articulation and the development of a model may potentially impact approaches to research across a number of the disciplines concerned, and in particular impact contemporary approaches to AI research.
1) Facilitate a series of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussions to define the driving set of problems meeting individually and in groups.
2) Research the current work that is informing the field in an on-going manner.
3) Brainstorm about new processes with workers in the lab generating texts, dynamic diagrams, papers.
4) Develop the beginnings of a virtual model with long term plan about how the model can continue to be developed.
5) Work with a designer at the lab to begin developing dynamic sections and or working fragments of the operative processes to inform the VR model.
6) Develop a plan for the continuation and extension of the model as ongoing research. Write a paper that outlines the plan.
Questions to be potentially discussed to inform the model:
• How can our electro-chemical device come to differentiate context?
• How can differing kinds of neuronal functioning/synapse flows and their shunting mechanisms be explored to model a synthetic electro-chemical computer?
• To what degree does the “measure” of the biological throughtbody, or the relation of the body to environment, define a relation to consciousness?
• What aspects of this physical relation between “body” and environment can be retained in such a model and what needs to be “pragmatically” re-understood ?
• How can we design an electro-chemical pattern matching, pattern generating, pattern abstracting system? Could this system record change over time as a dynamic electro-chemical spatiotemporal pattern [field map]?
• How can we make the system self-aware (or operatively self-altering) so that it can “internally” operate on patterns to form and operationally recombine “categories” as well as to establish a meta-pattern flow [time-based meta-field]?
• How can we give senses to this electro-chemical ThoughtBody to collect and translate qualities of the surrounding environment into a form that can be registered by the ThoughtBody?
• How can this ThoughtBody become situated and be formed through “reciprocal action” and/or linguistic “mutual forming” processes?
• What machinic senses will inform the system?
• Should an electro-chemical ThoughtBody also be in a continuous state of becoming and passing away?
• How could such a device actively be formed within a mutual linguistic forming process that is both social and cultural?
• Should a goal for the device be to re-create itself or create a hybrid sub-self by intermingling with other related electro-chemical ThoughtBodies?
• Could such a ThoughtBody function forever in an ongoing state of material change and growth?
• To what extent might the device define a unified “self” – or an ability to be self-aware?
• Should such a device have a distributed set of “senses” to inform its becoming? How does distributed sensing alter the “self”.
• Should we author “drives” and an “ethics” into such a synthetic-self?
• Can such receptors be distributed across the world or does proximity /localness have relevance to the system? What becomes the measure of its embodied behavior?
• Do we want to emulate the human set of senses or do we want to build an extension or augmentation system of machinic senses?
• Might such a system have synthetic senses that are “of themselves” and generally unlike human senses?
How would the registering of these “senses” become articulate to human interactors?
• How might a local robotic body with a sense of balance and haptic response system become bound to the larger distributed system?
• What role does such proprioception have in linguistic forming?
• Does such an electro-chemical device serve to extend human perception or to take on a new form of synthetic self-awareness and become an intellectual/self-aware entity, unto itself?
• It seems clear that such an electro-chemical device will need both a ThoughtBody and an ExperienceBody that functions as a unified field of becoming. How do we facilitate this?
• Should we potentially move away from a fitness model of adaptation to new mutually supportive models of human/machine co-adaption.
• Should an electro-chemical device be given a set of pre-dispositions, desires, and needs? How might this be done?
• How will the ThoughtBody receive and translate/encode an ongoing, changing set of physical perturbations?
• Will this system become perturbed at a different state level than humans or be tuned to multiple states?
• How many simultaneous streams of sensor flow will such a system be able to parse?
• Is it possible to parse a series of “expert” systems to interface with the thoughtbody?
• How will the nature of “focus” manifest itself in such a system. – the human doesn’t take in all of the flow – they only take in fragment/streams on the highest level of focus.
• How can we construct our electro-chemical ThoughtBody to build-up meaningful relations and have it come to know context? Our new linguistics can be articulated as a set of spatial/temporal patterns that are reinforced by multiple contextual combinations, abstractions, iterations, and most importantly, repetitions. Inferences are also central to the learning of language. How can we articulate this in the system?
• Will our Electro-chemical ThoughtBody communicate through “natural language” or begin to establish a language of its own — a human machinic creole?
• What kind of operating system would enable such a system to operate?
• Will it have an underlying code that enables natural language to function on another level?
• Will this device include a media-linguistics as output to extend the potentials of speech/text?
• Will this device be able to communicate with humans or will it derive a post-human communication that is self-actuated bridging of human and ‘machinic perception’?
• Will this device articulate itself via an elaborate virtual environment that is externally experienced by humans and/or related machines?
• How will the electro-chemical ThoughtBody understand, communicate and parse pattern, pattern matches, pattern abstraction? Language? Fields of meaning?
• How will our electro-chemical device make such logical connections and inferences between patterns, structures and differing sensual qualities of pattern production, pattern displacement and replacement, as well as pattern combination and recombination?
• Do we give the electro-chemical device a childhood filled with sense perturbations and mutual formings?
• If we give one device a childhood can it pass on the knowledge without having lived it as embodied experience?
• Can the device understand “linguistic” patterns as intermingled with experience and thus the production of meaning as an on-going, non-static phenomenon?
• What is the act of creation and how might our electro-chemical computer become creative through pattern understanding and re-application?
• How will contextual understanding be brought to bare to enable relevant new contextual behavior?
• How can the notions of fields of meaning be used in the development of our model?
• How will we be able to register difference, reflection and enable “machinic” meta-reflection on this difference in an electro-chemical environment?
• Will such a device be able to interface with electro-mechanical devices and/or standard computers?
• How will media experience inform the system?
• In what manner can our electro-chemical device be interfaced with other devices?
• How can our electro-chemical device enable such dynamic distribution of state change flow?
a) Body ßàBody [pattern matching] (mutual forming)
b) Intra – subject ßàobject , now deemed
c) Subject ßàobjectßàenvironment continuum
d) Body as environment embedded in environment
e) Embodied relation to environment — environmental interaction generates multiple streams of sense perturbations — an ongoing spatial-temporal flow.
f) Multiple sense streams are parsed and attention shifts between sight, touch, sound, smell, taste, balance, and proprioception at any given moment of the flow.
g) The flows support and reinforce each other from alternate sensual perspectives.
h) This spatial temporal flow brings about ongoing state changes in the brain.
i) The thoughtbody reacts to this flow with appropriate behavior.
• Can we emulate this set of process in our electro-chemical mechanism or should we devise another approach?
• Can our electro-chemical device also come to have a voice?
• Will such a device have desires?
• To what degree is this device to be based on the workings of the human?
• What attributes would we seek to avoid in the model?
• How will an electro-chemical mechanism enable multiple perturbations to be registered, focused on, and later remembered as framed within linguistic forming “experiences”?
• To what extent will sonic perturbations become music for the electro-chemical computer?
• Will such a computer find “pleasure” perturbations?
A field flow map
Pattern generation [multi-sensual] ongoing linguistic becoming [the frame of experience]) * subject|object unity • pattern observance • multi-sense perturbation • multi-sensual pattern flow • the set of environmental frequencies [spectrum of frequencies available to the body or via technology] • become translated via the thoughtbody into a set of electro-chemical flows • movement through the body — spatiotemporal electro-chemical flow àbody and brain set of state changes • pattern matching • parsing and self-reflective loops • reciprocal action with other and environment •[self as bio-environment embedded in environment] •pattern/field generation (linguistics) • behavior / output
• How will this trajectory be translated into an electro-chemical computing model?
• How will embodied experience be realized?
• On what level of frequency response will the electro-chemical computer be calibrated?
• Might the system have different potential calibrations?
• How can we articulate a benevolent system?
Poetic Text
The Thoughtbody Environment
Inspired by an ongoing conversation with Otto Rössler
This one field, this set of fields, this meaning becoming.
this repetition of the similar but different pattern flows,
this building up of a body of thought.
This ever emergent Thoughtbody Environment,
this mechanism of linguistic forming and framing,
this fleeting self — how can we better come to know it?
A displacement illuminates placement.
We can only point, so we work toward building a specific pointing machine.
Each resonance is folded back in, altering a physical… configuration.
This organization of systems, interpenetrating systems — intra-active,
in a delicate balance, flowing. A chain reaction ripples across this flow of scales and
articulates structure reflecting this physicality.
What if we were to build a Thoughtbody mechanism?
To take all the knowledge we can glean about the body’s workings – of functionality…
of physics and biomechanics— to observe the body at its greatest possible depth, and to
build a self-aware bio-machine, based on these human patterns. This is the premise. The
starting point of a life-long investigation.
We come to be sentient by an intermingling of process flows incorporating many bioterrains
and qualities of signaling – the delicate finesse of structuring. Electrical,
Biomechanical, Bio-photonic, Electrochemical … and the open question — This
arising of networks within networks — a circulation of circulations, enfolds the
topological fields housed in this moist substrate.
From the Endophysics of the infinitely small, breaking like a wave across a
continuum, to the infinitely large… All assumed within the limits of perception—
generating entanglements from a distance, at one with the proximity over time.
Percolating up as Otto says, affecting the conventionally real, real.
Becoming one in an ongoing manner.
The limits of the apparatus, the limits of science, of observation systems,
of evocation... despite our limitations, the limits of the construction of the Thoughtbody,
we continue this process of meaning-becoming. We continue.
Metaphors flow across the topology of each biological system.
The erotic dynamics of the edges — temporary boundary zones form this infinte unity,
And lend a graspable balanced substantiality to the mutability of flows -
To our meaning-becoming, born of pattern games,
In part, naming… forming and framing. Breathing.
An extended linguistics is one with us, our experience body — arising through
the fragile buildup of a lifetime of multimodal flows. The appearance of stasis in a
definition can only be change in slow motion — in this open non-equilibrium system, a
temporary measure – meaning becoming.
Now we seek to embody mathematics, to provide a new set of perspectives,
against the calculus of this problematic measure — the moist relative body — a body of
on-going change— the sublime nature of flows form the infinite state machine – an
electrochemical computer.
We seek to articulate an e-phany physics, to re-embody the physics of the infinitely
small.
To build a functioning endophysical world, and to observe it with all the potentials of the
senses. Sparking, spiking, ebbing, cresting, flowing . Sentience arising
across precisely timed dimensional fields of phasings — the Thoughtbody topology,
where the physical and the conceptual co-arise.
A smell , a taste, the touch of a hand, the positioning of the body.
The sense of heat and electricity. The sound of motion. The taste of salt.
The soft lumionous eider-hair. The erotic draw.
The physicality of the senses intra-forming. The projections of language.
Every bodily awareness is enfolded in the pattern flow… building up and recombining
with memory… merging as one moving salient process…
Sentience.
We use Heraclitus’s river as a generating station. A fluid metaphor, flowing in both
directions - a superpositioning – like an erotic entanglement. Moving reciprocally
forward and backward in time. This quiet set of flows, summing and becoming the
present.
As the precise edge of the present moves in infinitely small degrees.
The residue of change forms an accretive internal landscape.
Always nested or embedded in a larger environment, this oneness,
these flows, form subtle change… the nature of qualities —
now perceptible, now imperceptible, within the shifting science of amplification.
Machines of translation and observance deliver this ultra-delicate behavior
into the world of perception.
So how better to study these pattern flows, than to generate this model for a sentient
device?
To actuate its potentiality. To construct a model for an electrochemical Thoughtbody.
Through approaching this device , this Thoughtbody, displaying infinite subtlety,
we come to know ourselves — the generation of a moving abstraction.
N_S.E.N.T.I.E.N.T. Entity
Neo-sentient, Neo-computational; Self-organizing; Environmentally embedded;
Nascent; Temporal; Intra-active; Emergent; Navigational; Transdisciplinary —
A new paradigm that seeks to illuminate the self…
Or perhaps reciprocally, a new sentient entity that seeks to illuminate
the nature of thought as it physically arises.
I first dreamed of a computer made of pure coherent light. In part,
it turns out, I was dreaming of the self…beauty of bio-photonic emissions.
This inner light of knowing; of signaling; contributing to the unity
from an illuminated internal set of dynamic perspectives —
one quality of flow in this Thoughtbody assemblage,
Signaling coherently.
Mapping Zeno’s paradox. The patterns ripple across the senses summing as the present,
through a time-sunk network, articulating n-dimensional recombinant flows.
Microtubular swimming / summing — dynamic liquid ballet.
Swimmers contracting and expanding, dancing at the edge of science as part of the art of
becoming. Circulating, rotating, coming together and apart… Coherent flows and
quantum entanglements --- the growth of accretive pattern flows, bridging body and
environment.
Circulating and signaling, defining an on-going flow-set chain reaction.
A holistic paradigm, informed by and informing self-reflection.
The residues of multimodal experience - each sense reinforcing the other,
define a projection mechanism, a navigational device,
a set of potentials for the benevolence engine, among a myriad of functionalities
How do we grow this body?
… Articulate a neuron farm?
How do we mimick the sub-domains that enable intelligence to arise at every level?
How do we define a synthetic genetics?
How can we coax sentience to emerge?
What does of sound mind and body mean, in this flowing space of sonic resonances?
The accumulation of pattern flows becomes enfolded.
Shifting the direction of understanding.
Repositioning and (re)sensing the body in an ongoing manner.
We re-assume it informing a direction, an approach, a way to proceed, a process to
follow— new pointing mechanisms, a pattern flow of pattern flows.
We meander through the landscape of knowledge, desire hovering beneath the surface.
Each field contributing to this ongoing meaning-becoming — forming this Thoughtbody
Through an extended linguistics, until it’s own pattern production mechanisms
Arise in relation… arise in response. Will we have a conversation?
About different perspectives that illuminate…
Always projecting , always enfolding, this is the fluid measure of understanding.
Always in process, this river of thought. The oneness must be divided to make this
point.
The cut can not be made without disturbing the interface —
the surface of reflection. How to transcend the nature of refraction
inherent to bodies of water? Thoughtbodies. This is the endophysical equation. To
devise a machinic superobserver, a meta-meaning system, a frictionless flow mapping
device.
A micro-building block methodology.
How exquisite this sublime set of framed flows, forming the holistic field.
The mind makes a device to transcend the nature of mind, the nature of touch —
the life of entanglements. Yet, doesn’t even this device become entangled?
All arising through a machinic abstraction --- a machinic linguistics, that when all is said
and done, seeks to illuminate mind. The goal is to cast light on the flows where coherent
light is already cast. This promotes a change in direction, defines an alternate course —
An open order cybernetics. The steersman shifts the positioning of hands.
The destination never arrives --- process redefines direction.
Speed of light, speed of sound, speed of chemical flows, speed of glass,
Speed of skin, speed of waves — a body of speeds summing, forming the temporal speed
of thought.
Bill Seaman 2005
Bill Seaman: The Thoughtbody Environment, 03-10-2020, in: Archive of Digital Art The Thoughtbody Environment
Toward the development of A model for a Situated Electro-chemical Computer
Extending a Collaboration between Otto Rössler and Bill Seaman
In order to model and ultimately build an electro-chemical computer, one seeks to understand operative processes from the body and re-understand them in the context of a device that is not human in nature. The notion of exploring a similar operative substrate to that of the body, flowing electro-chemical activity, is central. The residency would be used to develop the broad parameters for the modeling of this dynamic “Thoughtbody” environment, exploring approaches to ongoing reception of “sense” perturbations, the parsing and/or reaction to these “perturbations” and relevant “change” or reciprocal action in the environment, drawing directly from current interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary scientific understanding. Collaborative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussion of the nexus of problems surrounding the task will be central. Knowledge from a series of different realms will need to be brought together to articulate the breadth of driving problems.
Central to this project is interdisciplinary and transdiciplinary research. The scientific backgrounds of the researchers at the AI lab bring the necessary skills to explore such a complex problem. This project would seek to include researchers from biology, the neuro-sciences, engineering, information technology, physics, mathematics, psychology, art and design. We also see an expanded embodied linguistics as central to the project. Otto Rössler brings his knowledge from a series of differing domains.
A Synthetic ThoughtBody is a mind/body/environmental unity built up through an ongoing relation to “reciprocal forming/framing processes.”A perceived “pattern” is the ability of a set of “sensors” functioning in conjunction with the ThoughtBody to register changes that are encountered over time. The physical qualities that are “encoded “ into an electro-chemical flow become “registered” or are physically parsed. Ongoing state changes form a particular “biologically encoded” time-based multi-sensual spatial pattern or history of physical events or incidents registered both by the network of sensors and the synthetic “brain” working in tandem — the Thoughtbody. The ability to develop operational “linguistic” categories (based on these patterns) that are functionally recombinant [and thus can be applied in new contexts] is pivotal. It is central that the self-reflective “articulation process” related to environmental knowledge be build up such that it can be used to establish context in an ongoing manner — to learn from that context and operate within that context. The ThoughtBody is an environment that is embedded in a larger environment and is in an ongoing process of reciprocal action and change — mobile and/or distributed, and situated. Thus an intimate link or bridge must be established across domains and scales – functionally coupling the environmental with the embedded environment of synthetic neuronal activity.
Could it be that each time we encounter a similar set of environmental qualities [seeing a “text” also as a recombinant pattern], we draw on our “state-change residue” of related “encoded” incidents and perform a multi-modal pattern-matching, project meaning [categorical code matches] into the environmental context (also based on a build-up of a categorical set of fields) and respond in an appropriate manner based on recombining operational categorical “fragments” [define new field interconnection flows] from the history of these registered experiences, applying them to the current context? Could an electro-chemical computer be articulated such that it would basically function in the same manner?
Starting with a new premise we call “Open Order Cybernetics” (unpublished paper by Seaman and Gaugusch) we suggest that language acquisition and the production of meaning is an open, ongoing process. This is central to articulating, operating within and extending reality. This means that the electro-chemical computer will need to be situated and informed by an embodied linguistics that is built-up over an extended period of time through reciprocal action with others, “self” and environment (both informed locally and via distributed input). Embodied learning and the definition of situated-ness become pivotal.
The constructions of an extensive multi-modal sensing system is also intrinsic to the system. The registering and categorical parsing of multiple sense perturbations over time, forms what we call spatial/temporal patterns of experience. The development of a code system that can operationally parse and operate on this input is one area of investigation. Certain understandings arise in relation to specific repeated qualities of behavior and/or environmental relation (as framed through language and mutual forming relations). Our learning from pattern-perception [field intermingling] and pattern matching [field comparison] begins with our relationship to our early environmental surroundings. Certainly operational field recombinance enables the ongoing flow of thought.
We hope to gain more knowledge about mind/brain/body in the process of this research as well as to extend understanding related to each of the disciplines described above. The approach is to build a transdisciplinary vocabulary to help bridge the fields as well as to enable discussion surrounding the model and in turn the multi-model articulation of the model through visualization and sonification and other yet to be determined forms. The clear articulation and the development of a model may potentially impact approaches to research across a number of the disciplines concerned, and in particular impact contemporary approaches to AI research.
1) Facilitate a series of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discussions to define the driving set of problems meeting individually and in groups.
2) Research the current work that is informing the field in an on-going manner.
3) Brainstorm about new processes with workers in the lab generating texts, dynamic diagrams, papers.
4) Develop the beginnings of a virtual model with long term plan about how the model can continue to be developed.
5) Work with a designer at the lab to begin developing dynamic sections and or working fragments of the operative processes to inform the VR model.
6) Develop a plan for the continuation and extension of the model as ongoing research. Write a paper that outlines the plan.
Questions to be potentially discussed to inform the model:
• How can our electro-chemical device come to differentiate context?
• How can differing kinds of neuronal functioning/synapse flows and their shunting mechanisms be explored to model a synthetic electro-chemical computer?
• To what degree does the “measure” of the biological throughtbody, or the relation of the body to environment, define a relation to consciousness?
• What aspects of this physical relation between “body” and environment can be retained in such a model and what needs to be “pragmatically” re-understood ?
• How can we design an electro-chemical pattern matching, pattern generating, pattern abstracting system? Could this system record change over time as a dynamic electro-chemical spatiotemporal pattern [field map]?
• How can we make the system self-aware (or operatively self-altering) so that it can “internally” operate on patterns to form and operationally recombine “categories” as well as to establish a meta-pattern flow [time-based meta-field]?
• How can we give senses to this electro-chemical ThoughtBody to collect and translate qualities of the surrounding environment into a form that can be registered by the ThoughtBody?
• How can this ThoughtBody become situated and be formed through “reciprocal action” and/or linguistic “mutual forming” processes?
• What machinic senses will inform the system?
• Should an electro-chemical ThoughtBody also be in a continuous state of becoming and passing away?
• How could such a device actively be formed within a mutual linguistic forming process that is both social and cultural?
• Should a goal for the device be to re-create itself or create a hybrid sub-self by intermingling with other related electro-chemical ThoughtBodies?
• Could such a ThoughtBody function forever in an ongoing state of material change and growth?
• To what extent might the device define a unified “self” – or an ability to be self-aware?
• Should such a device have a distributed set of “senses” to inform its becoming? How does distributed sensing alter the “self”.
• Should we author “drives” and an “ethics” into such a synthetic-self?
• Can such receptors be distributed across the world or does proximity /localness have relevance to the system? What becomes the measure of its embodied behavior?
• Do we want to emulate the human set of senses or do we want to build an extension or augmentation system of machinic senses?
• Might such a system have synthetic senses that are “of themselves” and generally unlike human senses?
How would the registering of these “senses” become articulate to human interactors?
• How might a local robotic body with a sense of balance and haptic response system become bound to the larger distributed system?
• What role does such proprioception have in linguistic forming?
• Does such an electro-chemical device serve to extend human perception or to take on a new form of synthetic self-awareness and become an intellectual/self-aware entity, unto itself?
• It seems clear that such an electro-chemical device will need both a ThoughtBody and an ExperienceBody that functions as a unified field of becoming. How do we facilitate this?
• Should we potentially move away from a fitness model of adaptation to new mutually supportive models of human/machine co-adaption.
• Should an electro-chemical device be given a set of pre-dispositions, desires, and needs? How might this be done?
• How will the ThoughtBody receive and translate/encode an ongoing, changing set of physical perturbations?
• Will this system become perturbed at a different state level than humans or be tuned to multiple states?
• How many simultaneous streams of sensor flow will such a system be able to parse?
• Is it possible to parse a series of “expert” systems to interface with the thoughtbody?
• How will the nature of “focus” manifest itself in such a system. – the human doesn’t take in all of the flow – they only take in fragment/streams on the highest level of focus.
• How can we construct our electro-chemical ThoughtBody to build-up meaningful relations and have it come to know context? Our new linguistics can be articulated as a set of spatial/temporal patterns that are reinforced by multiple contextual combinations, abstractions, iterations, and most importantly, repetitions. Inferences are also central to the learning of language. How can we articulate this in the system?
• Will our Electro-chemical ThoughtBody communicate through “natural language” or begin to establish a language of its own — a human machinic creole?
• What kind of operating system would enable such a system to operate?
• Will it have an underlying code that enables natural language to function on another level?
• Will this device include a media-linguistics as output to extend the potentials of speech/text?
• Will this device be able to communicate with humans or will it derive a post-human communication that is self-actuated bridging of human and ‘machinic perception’?
• Will this device articulate itself via an elaborate virtual environment that is externally experienced by humans and/or related machines?
• How will the electro-chemical ThoughtBody understand, communicate and parse pattern, pattern matches, pattern abstraction? Language? Fields of meaning?
• How will our electro-chemical device make such logical connections and inferences between patterns, structures and differing sensual qualities of pattern production, pattern displacement and replacement, as well as pattern combination and recombination?
• Do we give the electro-chemical device a childhood filled with sense perturbations and mutual formings?
• If we give one device a childhood can it pass on the knowledge without having lived it as embodied experience?
• Can the device understand “linguistic” patterns as intermingled with experience and thus the production of meaning as an on-going, non-static phenomenon?
• What is the act of creation and how might our electro-chemical computer become creative through pattern understanding and re-application?
• How will contextual understanding be brought to bare to enable relevant new contextual behavior?
• How can the notions of fields of meaning be used in the development of our model?
• How will we be able to register difference, reflection and enable “machinic” meta-reflection on this difference in an electro-chemical environment?
• Will such a device be able to interface with electro-mechanical devices and/or standard computers?
• How will media experience inform the system?
• In what manner can our electro-chemical device be interfaced with other devices?
• How can our electro-chemical device enable such dynamic distribution of state change flow?
a) Body ßàBody [pattern matching] (mutual forming)
b) Intra – subject ßàobject , now deemed
c) Subject ßàobjectßàenvironment continuum
d) Body as environment embedded in environment
e) Embodied relation to environment — environmental interaction generates multiple streams of sense perturbations — an ongoing spatial-temporal flow.
f) Multiple sense streams are parsed and attention shifts between sight, touch, sound, smell, taste, balance, and proprioception at any given moment of the flow.
g) The flows support and reinforce each other from alternate sensual perspectives.
h) This spatial temporal flow brings about ongoing state changes in the brain.
i) The thoughtbody reacts to this flow with appropriate behavior.
• Can we emulate this set of process in our electro-chemical mechanism or should we devise another approach?
• Can our electro-chemical device also come to have a voice?
• Will such a device have desires?
• To what degree is this device to be based on the workings of the human?
• What attributes would we seek to avoid in the model?
• How will an electro-chemical mechanism enable multiple perturbations to be registered, focused on, and later remembered as framed within linguistic forming “experiences”?
• To what extent will sonic perturbations become music for the electro-chemical computer?
• Will such a computer find “pleasure” perturbations?
A field flow map
Pattern generation [multi-sensual] ongoing linguistic becoming [the frame of experience]) * subject|object unity • pattern observance • multi-sense perturbation • multi-sensual pattern flow • the set of environmental frequencies [spectrum of frequencies available to the body or via technology] • become translated via the thoughtbody into a set of electro-chemical flows • movement through the body — spatiotemporal electro-chemical flow àbody and brain set of state changes • pattern matching • parsing and self-reflective loops • reciprocal action with other and environment •[self as bio-environment embedded in environment] •pattern/field generation (linguistics) • behavior / output
• How will this trajectory be translated into an electro-chemical computing model?
• How will embodied experience be realized?
• On what level of frequency response will the electro-chemical computer be calibrated?
• Might the system have different potential calibrations?
• How can we articulate a benevolent system?
Poetic Text
The Thoughtbody Environment
Inspired by an ongoing conversation with Otto Rössler
This one field, this set of fields, this meaning becoming.
this repetition of the similar but different pattern flows,
this building up of a body of thought.
This ever emergent Thoughtbody Environment,
this mechanism of linguistic forming and framing,
this fleeting self — how can we better come to know it?
A displacement illuminates placement.
We can only point, so we work toward building a specific pointing machine.
Each resonance is folded back in, altering a physical… configuration.
This organization of systems, interpenetrating systems — intra-active,
in a delicate balance, flowing. A chain reaction ripples across this flow of scales and
articulates structure reflecting this physicality.
What if we were to build a Thoughtbody mechanism?
To take all the knowledge we can glean about the body’s workings – of functionality…
of physics and biomechanics— to observe the body at its greatest possible depth, and to
build a self-aware bio-machine, based on these human patterns. This is the premise. The
starting point of a life-long investigation.
We come to be sentient by an intermingling of process flows incorporating many bioterrains
and qualities of signaling – the delicate finesse of structuring. Electrical,
Biomechanical, Bio-photonic, Electrochemical … and the open question — This
arising of networks within networks — a circulation of circulations, enfolds the
topological fields housed in this moist substrate.
From the Endophysics of the infinitely small, breaking like a wave across a
continuum, to the infinitely large… All assumed within the limits of perception—
generating entanglements from a distance, at one with the proximity over time.
Percolating up as Otto says, affecting the conventionally real, real.
Becoming one in an ongoing manner.
The limits of the apparatus, the limits of science, of observation systems,
of evocation... despite our limitations, the limits of the construction of the Thoughtbody,
we continue this process of meaning-becoming. We continue.
Metaphors flow across the topology of each biological system.
The erotic dynamics of the edges — temporary boundary zones form this infinte unity,
And lend a graspable balanced substantiality to the mutability of flows -
To our meaning-becoming, born of pattern games,
In part, naming… forming and framing. Breathing.
An extended linguistics is one with us, our experience body — arising through
the fragile buildup of a lifetime of multimodal flows. The appearance of stasis in a
definition can only be change in slow motion — in this open non-equilibrium system, a
temporary measure – meaning becoming.
Now we seek to embody mathematics, to provide a new set of perspectives,
against the calculus of this problematic measure — the moist relative body — a body of
on-going change— the sublime nature of flows form the infinite state machine – an
electrochemical computer.
We seek to articulate an e-phany physics, to re-embody the physics of the infinitely
small.
To build a functioning endophysical world, and to observe it with all the potentials of the
senses. Sparking, spiking, ebbing, cresting, flowing . Sentience arising
across precisely timed dimensional fields of phasings — the Thoughtbody topology,
where the physical and the conceptual co-arise.
A smell , a taste, the touch of a hand, the positioning of the body.
The sense of heat and electricity. The sound of motion. The taste of salt.
The soft lumionous eider-hair. The erotic draw.
The physicality of the senses intra-forming. The projections of language.
Every bodily awareness is enfolded in the pattern flow… building up and recombining
with memory… merging as one moving salient process…
Sentience.
We use Heraclitus’s river as a generating station. A fluid metaphor, flowing in both
directions - a superpositioning – like an erotic entanglement. Moving reciprocally
forward and backward in time. This quiet set of flows, summing and becoming the
present.
As the precise edge of the present moves in infinitely small degrees.
The residue of change forms an accretive internal landscape.
Always nested or embedded in a larger environment, this oneness,
these flows, form subtle change… the nature of qualities —
now perceptible, now imperceptible, within the shifting science of amplification.
Machines of translation and observance deliver this ultra-delicate behavior
into the world of perception.
So how better to study these pattern flows, than to generate this model for a sentient
device?
To actuate its potentiality. To construct a model for an electrochemical Thoughtbody.
Through approaching this device , this Thoughtbody, displaying infinite subtlety,
we come to know ourselves — the generation of a moving abstraction.
N_S.E.N.T.I.E.N.T. Entity
Neo-sentient, Neo-computational; Self-organizing; Environmentally embedded;
Nascent; Temporal; Intra-active; Emergent; Navigational; Transdisciplinary —
A new paradigm that seeks to illuminate the self…
Or perhaps reciprocally, a new sentient entity that seeks to illuminate
the nature of thought as it physically arises.
I first dreamed of a computer made of pure coherent light. In part,
it turns out, I was dreaming of the self…beauty of bio-photonic emissions.
This inner light of knowing; of signaling; contributing to the unity
from an illuminated internal set of dynamic perspectives —
one quality of flow in this Thoughtbody assemblage,
Signaling coherently.
Mapping Zeno’s paradox. The patterns ripple across the senses summing as the present,
through a time-sunk network, articulating n-dimensional recombinant flows.
Microtubular swimming / summing — dynamic liquid ballet.
Swimmers contracting and expanding, dancing at the edge of science as part of the art of
becoming. Circulating, rotating, coming together and apart… Coherent flows and
quantum entanglements --- the growth of accretive pattern flows, bridging body and
environment.
Circulating and signaling, defining an on-going flow-set chain reaction.
A holistic paradigm, informed by and informing self-reflection.
The residues of multimodal experience - each sense reinforcing the other,
define a projection mechanism, a navigational device,
a set of potentials for the benevolence engine, among a myriad of functionalities
How do we grow this body?
… Articulate a neuron farm?
How do we mimick the sub-domains that enable intelligence to arise at every level?
How do we define a synthetic genetics?
How can we coax sentience to emerge?
What does of sound mind and body mean, in this flowing space of sonic resonances?
The accumulation of pattern flows becomes enfolded.
Shifting the direction of understanding.
Repositioning and (re)sensing the body in an ongoing manner.
We re-assume it informing a direction, an approach, a way to proceed, a process to
follow— new pointing mechanisms, a pattern flow of pattern flows.
We meander through the landscape of knowledge, desire hovering beneath the surface.
Each field contributing to this ongoing meaning-becoming — forming this Thoughtbody
Through an extended linguistics, until it’s own pattern production mechanisms
Arise in relation… arise in response. Will we have a conversation?
About different perspectives that illuminate…
Always projecting , always enfolding, this is the fluid measure of understanding.
Always in process, this river of thought. The oneness must be divided to make this
point.
The cut can not be made without disturbing the interface —
the surface of reflection. How to transcend the nature of refraction
inherent to bodies of water? Thoughtbodies. This is the endophysical equation. To
devise a machinic superobserver, a meta-meaning system, a frictionless flow mapping
device.
A micro-building block methodology.
How exquisite this sublime set of framed flows, forming the holistic field.
The mind makes a device to transcend the nature of mind, the nature of touch —
the life of entanglements. Yet, doesn’t even this device become entangled?
All arising through a machinic abstraction --- a machinic linguistics, that when all is said
and done, seeks to illuminate mind. The goal is to cast light on the flows where coherent
light is already cast. This promotes a change in direction, defines an alternate course —
An open order cybernetics. The steersman shifts the positioning of hands.
The destination never arrives --- process redefines direction.
Speed of light, speed of sound, speed of chemical flows, speed of glass,
Speed of skin, speed of waves — a body of speeds summing, forming the temporal speed
of thought.
Bill Seaman 2005
Rachel Müller 19-05-2020
The Thoughtbody - A Model for a Neo-sentient Computer (The Benevolence Engine) is informed by an ongoing collaboration with Otto Rössler. The notion of building a model for an electro-chemical computer is both an exciting and daunting task. In order to model and ultimately build such a device, one seeks to borrow important operative elements and processes from the body and re-understand them in the context of a device that is not human in nature. Certainly the task is to learn more about mind/brain/body in the process. This process will need to bridge a series of domains including biology, physics, cognitive science, computer science, bio-electrical engineering, electrical engineering, expanded linguistics, philosophy, psychology and the arts. Starting with a new premise related to an "Open Order Cybernetics" (Seaman and Gaugusch), we will see that language acquisition and the production of meaning is both an open ongoing process - is situated and informed by reciprocal action with others, self and environment. Thus a delicate intermingling of the scientific, the philosophical and linguistic pre-suppositions surrounding such a project must be carefully examined.
The first Installation related to this project included a video work entitled The Thoughtbody Environment / Toward a Model for An Electrochemical Computer. Both a Portugese version and a Chinese Version have been completed of the tape, with poetic text and Video by Seaman. Subsequently Seaman has developed a major diagram of the model with Rössler as well as a series of papers. A second installation included a distributed text presented in lightboxes, scattered throughout the exhibition. Seaman presented a third related installation of site specific photographs for the Harris Museum in England.
Rachel Müller: The Thoughtbody Environment, 19-05-2020, in: Archive of Digital Art The Thoughtbody - A Model for a Neo-sentient Computer (The Benevolence Engine) is informed by an ongoing collaboration with Otto Rössler. The notion of building a model for an electro-chemical computer is both an exciting and daunting task. In order to model and ultimately build such a device, one seeks to borrow important operative elements and processes from the body and re-understand them in the context of a device that is not human in nature. Certainly the task is to learn more about mind/brain/body in the process. This process will need to bridge a series of domains including biology, physics, cognitive science, computer science, bio-electrical engineering, electrical engineering, expanded linguistics, philosophy, psychology and the arts. Starting with a new premise related to an "Open Order Cybernetics" (Seaman and Gaugusch), we will see that language acquisition and the production of meaning is both an open ongoing process - is situated and informed by reciprocal action with others, self and environment. Thus a delicate intermingling of the scientific, the philosophical and linguistic pre-suppositions surrounding such a project must be carefully examined.
The first Installation related to this project included a video work entitled The Thoughtbody Environment / Toward a Model for An Electrochemical Computer. Both a Portugese version and a Chinese Version have been completed of the tape, with poetic text and Video by Seaman. Subsequently Seaman has developed a major diagram of the model with Rössler as well as a series of papers. A second installation included a distributed text presented in lightboxes, scattered throughout the exhibition. Seaman presented a third related installation of site specific photographs for the Harris Museum in England.
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