Andrius Kulikauskas of Math 4 Wisdom asks for help to prepare, in the name of the Active Inference Institute, this
Draft Proposal
Active Inference for Bioregion Representation
- Summary: Citizen Scientists of the Sentient Age
- Inspiration: What Can We Implement Immediately?
Organizing Citizen Scientists
- Testable Hypothesis: Three Minds
- Testable Hypothesis: 24 Types of Inference
- Testable Hypothesis: Ecosystems Infer Actively
- Testable Hypothesis: Biofirms Can Integrate Economy and Ecology
Working with Enterprising Thought Leaders
- Deliverables
- Team
- Budget
- Enterprising Thought Leaders
Active Inference for Bioregion Representation
Summary: Citizen Scientists of the Sentient Age
The Active Inference Institute proposes to create four symbiotic public resources that establish sentience in:
- human experience, as represented in a Theory Translator of cultural history;
- human community, as manifested by an online Meaningful Inclusion Economy;
- table-top ecosystems, investigated by Citizen Scientists in a hundred bioregions applying TimberFish Technologies;
- a biofirm, engineered with Active Inference within an interaction rights management system for coordinating this global symbiotic effort.
These public resources and related investigations establish a scientific basis, global community, ecotechnology standard and symbiosis framework for recognizing, listening to, understanding, representing and respecting bioregions as sentient ecosystems.
We seek funders who are successful entrepreneurs, who believe in the importance of these endeavors, who wish for the Active Inference Institute to succeed, who would serve as Enterprising Thought Leaders, contributing their own experience, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of existing systems, sharing their visions and related ideas, bringing visibility to our projects. We will work with funders so that they can harvest (engage, adapt, absorb, seed, expand, enrich, study, replicate) these public resources in their endeavors. We seek contributions in amounts of $10,000 and $100,000.
The Active Inference Institute seeks $1,200,000 for this 12-month project. We can proceed in increments of $100,000. We are moving forward even without funding.
Inspiration: What Can We Implement Immediately?
This proposal is a response to Matthew Moroney's question: What can we implement immediately?
He asked this (here) at the Roundtable on Implications of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Active Inference Agentic Architectures organized by John Clippinger of First Principles First as part of our Applied Active Inference Symposium held on November 13-15, 2024. First Principles First is dedicated to understanding and forming The Sentient Age.
Bill Melton spoke (here) of looking to entrepreneurs, not government, for change in a world that is falling apart.
John C. Havens spoke (here) of a symbiosis of three kinds of care-giving: for individuals, society and nature. What Pope Francis talks about is an integrated ecology where it's a person feeling they have worth so they are able to connect with others and care and then understanding nature, biodiversity so there is a symbiosis of those systems.
Andrius Kulikauskas of Econet listened to this round table. He had just formulated an Econet Action Plan for the group he leads with ecotechnology pioneer Jere Northrop of TimberFish Technologies. This action plan happens to be organized around three teams developing the kinds of empathy Pope Francis seeks: for individuals, for society, and for our environment. This plan can be amplified with a fourth team for interlinking this empathy, as First Principles First envisions.
Andrius asked Daniel Friedman, President of the Active Inference Institute, to adapt, champion, undertake and execute this plan as a proposal on behalf of the Institute and its supporters. Daniel leads the Knowledge Engineering Study Group at Andrius's Math 4 Wisdom community. Daniel is also coding Active Inference into collectives of intelligent agents to realize John Clippinger's vision of Biofirms as digital proxies for bioregions, protecting them from destructive exploitation.
The Active Inference Institute is in a unique position to implement this proposal to incorporate and realize the visions of First Principles First and the Econet.
Organizing Citizen Scientists
Testable Hypothesis: Three Minds
Our testable hypothesis is that in all systems we can distinguish three levels of sentience. Sentience functions as a distillation, a distillation of distillation, and a distillation of distillation of distillation.
In this view, we distinguish
- sentience (of a being distilling its world)
- sentience of sentience (models that such a being constructs of itself and its world)
- sentience of that sentience of sentience (that being's oversight in imposing those models, and in deciding whether to rely on them or to engage the world directly)
This hypothesis is based on untangling our experience as human beings in terms of three minds (faculties, dispositions, operations):
- A mind that knows answers.
- A mind that asks questions, for it does not know directly.
- A mind that investigates, thereby bringing the other two minds into accord, what we know and what we don't know.
In the language of Active Inference, there is a Markov blanket between the answering mind (enmeshed in the world) and the questioning mind (divorced from the world). The answering mind speaks the language of emotion to the questioning mind to inform it of the inadequacies in the model that the questioning mind is imposing. The questioning mind reworks its models and imposes them with the language of cognition. Thus here emotion is an incoming perception, and cognition is an outgoing action. Furthermore, there is an investigating mind for governing this interaction in two ways. First, it can restrain the questioning mind so that it imposes its model only if that will yield a feeling of peace, indicating that the answering mind and questioning mind agree on the same information, but have it in two different forms: what we know (looking back) and what we don't know (looking forward). Secondly, the investigating mind can choose which mind to apply - the questioning mind, by way of its models, or the answering mind, directly engaging the world. Karl Friston speaks (here) of this investigatory mind as control of balance.
Active Inference, based on the free energy principle, is a universal idea, applicable for the analysis of all systems. As such, it is not a testable hypothesis. Whereas human experience provides specific grounds for scientifically investigating, clarifying and accumulating evidence for or against claims about reality. If we can fruitfully model human experience, and relate that model to the Active Inference theoretical framework, then we can rely on our human intuition, the most sophisticated instrument we may ever have, in engaging absolutely any system, as well as we can ever hope.
We thus propose to put to the test this hypothesis of the three minds, which is an entryway and centerpiece of Wondrous Wisdom, a language of wisdom that Andrius has documented since 1982, in his quest to know everything and apply that knowledge usefully. From 2014 to 2018, Andrius presented his findings in 45 academic presentations, including three at the 24th World Congress of Philosophy, with support from the European Union. In 2022, he founded Math 4 Wisdom, an investigatory community for absolute truth, to show where these conceptual frameworks arise in advanced mathematics, as in Lie theory (Bott periodicity) and category theory (Yoneda embedding). In 2024, Daniel and Andrius had 34 weekly hour long meetings about Active Inference (which Andrius is learning) and Wondrous Wisdom (which Daniel is learning). They are making many connections.
In August, 2024, the Active Inference Institute submitted to the Templeton Foundation a proposal, Active Inference of Absolute Truth, to create a public resource, an interactive online encyclopedia, to present and illustrate the three minds and the other conceptual structures of Wondrous Wisdom with thousands of examples from world history. This proposal was not funded.
Earlier thinkers have made comparable compilations. William James distinguished tough-minded and tender-minded thinkers, Isaiah Berlin - foxes and hedgehogs, John Cutting and later Ian McGilchrist - individuals or cultures which favor the right brain or the left brain. This should be a collaborative effort, not for categorizing and opposing people, but for showing how we humans have been drawing the same distinctions but talking about them in different ways.
Andrius created a web portal, Theory Translator, with about 200 examples of the three minds, dating back to Plato's Republic and even further. A contemporary example is Marsha M. Linehan's dialectical therapy, through which the emotional mind and the reasonable mind are synthesized by the wise mind. Similarly, Bayes theorem brings together evidence and hypothesis as belief. The Active Inference textbook, section 2.7, teaches that Active Inference unites and extends three apparently disconnected theoretical perspectives: enactive theories, predictive theories, and cybernetic theories.
Working together, collecting examples from the history of world culture, writing expository essays, interfacing with this content in creative projects, Andrius and our team will demonstrate that it is possible for different people to clarify these three minds and related conceptual structures, to agree on them in scientifically exploring human experience, and thus to share a reality that accords with our personal intuitions. Active Inference, as a robust scientific theoretical framework, will serve as a lingua franca to translate across theories, ancient and modern, non-Western and Western, indigenous and global, practical and metaphysical, academic and entrepreneurial.
This is a first domain where we are testing the hypothesis of the three minds and building a public resource, the Theory Translator, as we do so.
Testable Hypothesis: 24 Types of Inference
Our next testable hypothesis is that for any specific system we can distinguish its three minds by collecting and systematizing the 24 ways that it figures things out.
In particular, we can do so for any discipline or any personality. Since 2010, Andrius has made such studies of mathematics, physics, biology, neuroscience, sociology, chess, Gamestorming as well as individuals including Jere Northrop, Franz Nahrada, Andrius Kulikauskas, Jesus and the Gaon of Vilna.
In each case so far, the same complex 24-fold pattern seems to have emerged. Initially, there is an exploratory activity that opens up inquiry. Before there can be an explicit system of knowledge, there needs to be a tacit dialogue between the answering mind and the questioning mind. Each of them reveals themselves through four levels of knowledge: whether, what, how, why. These two dialogues are woven together by a learning cycle (the scientific method!) of taking a stand, following through and reflecting. This comes together in the seat of inquiry, the vantage point of the investigating mind (full-fledged consciousness!), the ideal observer for that discipline or personality. At that point, the ideal observer, upon whom the answering mind and questioning mind agree, can manifest the same four levels of knowledge, but also six transformations that address the gaps in knowledge. Finally, a unity can be drawn from these gaps, which leads one outside of the inquiry.
We will test this approach in the domain of economics. Ultimately, we would like to understand ecology, how to think ecologically and address our environmental crises. As modern humans, we have poor intuition about that, whereas as social primates we are quite sophisticated in economics, recognizing what fosters individuality or collectivity, self-interest or solidarity.
Our preliminary research suggests that economics starts as the justification of the ownership of property, who owns what and why. This allows for a dialogue between use value (enjoying things for their own sake) and exchange value (valuing what they can be exchanged for). This comes together in the main economic inference, teasing out the functions of money. There may be four functions of money which are transformed by six properties of money. Harmonizing those properties, fostering the economy, leads to the challenge of meaningful inclusion. We need to collect, consider, compare, contrast and classify hundreds of examples where economists make inferences. Then, as a team, we will possibly have developed an intuition as to the three minds that economics presumes, perhaps an answering mind that expresses underlying demand (use value), a questioning mind that generates the possibilities for production and redistribution (exchange value), and an investigating mind that manages the monetary system. This will allow us to make sense of economics in its entirety, perhaps as a mindset which takes ownership as given, however unjust or arbitrary, and opens up possibilities which lead towards meaningful inclusion, perhaps never arriving there. We will further seek alternatives, such as community economics, which may have entirely different mindsets, as with Jesus's teaching "give everything away", perhaps minimizing anxiety rather than maximizing happiness. This work within our own species prepares us to think profoundly about ecology.
Marcus Petz leads our team for this investigation. His deepest value in life is meaningful inclusion. He has an MS in Mountain Forestry and a PhD in Social and Public Policy for his dissertation on community currency for rural renaissance. In particular, he is investigating whether community economics is simply a topic for economics, or a discipline in its own right, with its own methodologies. He is particularly interested in syntropic finance, determining which economic forms are appropriate as community bonds grow.
Marcus will architect an online community economics system to encourage thousands of people to help with our citizen science projects. They will be recognized and rewarded for their contributions in catalyzing our community. We wish to:
- Provide participants with aquariums, equipment, testing supplies, etc.
- Contribute funding to a Kickstarter project to mass produce table-top units.
- Fund perks like swag, parties, rewards.
- Cover expenses such as travel, computer, phone, software, books.
- Pay for outreach expenses such as marketing or conference fees.
Marcus will design this Meaningful Inclusion Economy and modify it opportunistically to support all kinds of added value. He and his team will document any instances where the community demonstrates flickers of sentience, as participants alternate in using and exchanging, or otherwise oscillate in community economics, playing out an epistemological dialogue.
Testable Hypothesis: Ecosystems Infer Actively
Our third testable hypothesis is that we can observe how ecosystems infer and make sense of what that means for them.
Jere Northrop has 60 years of experience constructing, observing, exploring managed segregated ecosystems, from table-top aquarium units to industrial scale waste management systems. He has developed a simple, miniature, inexpensive TimberFish Technologies table-top unit, based on muck, twigs, nutrients, and small fish, which can serve as a standardized ecosystem, much as genetics is based on Drosophila fruit flies, cancer research works with lab mice, and there are other such model organisms. We will replicate, vary and extend the ways that Jere has set up problems which his ecosystems are able to solve. As a global team of citizen scientists, we will collect evidence for how such model ecosystems infer. Ultimately, we aspire to uncover the pattern of ways that a sentient being infers. We can then supportively understand how its investigating mind balances its questioning mind and answering mind. We can love an ecosystem as it wishes to be loved. See TimberFish Technologies
Imagine playing with a baby or a puppy. We can switch back and forth between two modes. We can lean in and do something to get their attention, perhaps make eye contact. And we can lean out to give them room and observe their reaction. We can do this back and forth until they start directing our attention and we can let them lead. This way we are activating in them the alternation between both minds, answering (stepping in) and questioning (stepping out). At this point we can find the balance, the tipping point between those two minds, and try to position them at that edge. Then they have maximal freedom to decide which way to go. We are loving them and they enjoy a flicker of consciousness. For a puppy, it may be just a momentary flicker, and for a baby it may be part of a growing habit of moments of consciousness. But the idea is that through love, all systems can be brought to the point of consciousness.
A flickering spirit is palpable at certain intense meetings where people can speak their minds and hearts. One person steps in, sharing and reliving their experience, oblivious to their fellows, yet inspiring them by their example. Emotionally, others are stepped out, calmly monitoring the dynamics of the room, how the testimony is received, or simply reflecting on it from a distance. Individuals step in and step out unpredictably. This can happen at a bible study or Alcoholics Anonymous meeting but also, possibly, in a business, academic or governmental setting, wherever a balance is achieved between stepping in and stepping out. The collective, as such, can manifest a consciousness.
Consider an ant colony. Daniel coauthored the paper The ant colony as a test for scientific theories of consciousness. Andrius took up this challenge, speculatively. He overviewed how various ant species figured things out and made a partial sketch of their epistemology. Ants are able to make inferences based on how often they are meeting their fellows. This seems to allow them to act cohesively as liquid ants, taking the shape of a ball or a bridge or a web, as needed. But ants also have glands with multiple kinds of pheromones which they dab on each other's foreheads. They can send this information one or two meters deep into the ground, a sterile environment for the queens, their eggs, and their cohorts. There is a sterility gradient, whereby the life cycle of an ant has it take up new roles further out into the filth of the world, never coming back. There are ants who, curiously, do nothing, and could serve as repositories for pheromones, much like memory chips. Thus there may be two very different minds, an answering mind which forages out in the world, and a questioning mind which calculates deep within the nest. What could balance them? The nest is a complex brainlike structure and nest maintainers open and close pathways, which could mediate the two minds and thus serve as the investigating mind, the consciousness, which matches up the other two minds, and then tips the balance in major decisions such as whether to fight a war, move the nest, or prepare for mating. This is all speculative yet is an example of how comprehensive theories can be developed which can then be tested with experiments.
We will organize citizen scientists to experiment with the TimberFish table-top unit in more than 100 bioregions of the world. Jere is preparing a minimalist specification. The basic idea is that a citizen scientist can place muck from a pond in a 70 liter (20 gallon) aquarium, add wood chips regularly, and that will be sufficient for microorganisms to flourish, feed worms and support small fish. The tank will need to be aerated, and some of the water replace, but no fish food will need to be added. Thus we have a miniature self-standing ecosystem with which we can experiment. This basic set up can function anywhere in any region where there are muck and wood chips. Importantly, there will be interesting variations, just as there are genetic differences among fruit flies. We are interested to learn how these variations can help distinguish bioregions so that they can be defined naturally, not arbitrarily.
Who would maintain and study such aquariums? There is a worldwide You Tube community, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, devoted to ecological aquariums, led by passionate investigators such as Louis Foxwell (Father Fish), Diana Walstad (Planted Aquariums) and Alexander Williamson (Fishtory). Each of them has their own favorite way of setting up an ecological aquarium. We will reach out to them, introduce Jere, invite them to work together, specify these basic systems, and encourage citizen scientists to try them out and experiment with them. We intend to find an experienced aquarist who would join Daniel, Andrius and Marcus as the leader of this team for investigating the sentience of an ecosystem, specifically, its ability to infer actively. A worldwide network of citizen scientists, ever demonstrating their competence, providing data, applying their creativity, will have profound value, which we should recognize, appreciate, reward and apply for the benefit of all. We start by showing them we value them.
The TimberFish table-top unit is a minimalist ecosystem which can be scaled up for communities or industries. Citizen scientists can use this table-top unit to learn how to keep notebooks, record pH and water quality levels, and observe microorganisms under a microscope. They can experiment with the productivity, from an agricultural or industrial point of view. How much healthy fish can be raised? How much do the wood chips increase in their fuel value? These are very practical questions that, at large scales, in the face of climate change, help make the most of local resources for fuel and food, and steer away from ecological disasters, such as cutting Amazon forests indiscriminately or overcrowding "wild" salmon farmed in Norwegian fjords. A table-top unit, a larger mobile trailer unit or a public space unit can catalyze interest in STEM disciplines - physics, chemistry, biology, geoscience, ecology, mathematics, engineering, but also, business, industry, social work, art and philosophy. This endeavor brings people together locally and globally.
These miniature ecosystems assist in teaching and learning the scientific method. In particular, citizen scientists can learn how to set up problems for their ecosystems to solve. How does an ecosystem in one space come to occupy a new space that opens up? What happens if a new species is introduced? How does it deal with a source of low level pollution? Or the lack or excess of a nutrient? What happens if two different ecosystems are hooked together?
We want to learn about the ecosystem's ability to infer, to figure things out, to solve problems. Jere calls this ecological intelligence, Ordinary muck is the result of billions of years of evolution. We expect to tease apart a miniature ecosystem's propensities for perception and action, backwards looking and forwards looking, to act based on what it already knows well, or based on what it does not know but is preparing for. Once we do that, we can construct situations that engage both propensities, where we hope to recognize what controls the balance, and amplify that. Then we can query the ecosystem, centered in the present, whether it chooses to lean backwards or forwards, function reactively or predictively. In this sense, an ecosystem can vote for the past or the future, for updating itself (accepting the environment) or adjusting its environment (staying true to itself). An ecosystem can speak for itself.
With this mindset, we start to appreciate that an ecosystem, like any sentient being, should have elemental rights, even a handful of muck. This may start with a simple consideration of how we dispose of muck, where it should go in our environment. That has us appreciate that we should keep it free of toxins, and so on. We start to gain intuition in ecological thinking which informs our practice and vice versa.
As we get results, we can apply this to larger ecotechnology projects, such as those that Jere has done or envisaged, including Ecologically Integrated Agriculture. We can study, engage and try to understand small natural systems, such as the pond brain that Stafford Beer investigated, but also larger ecosystems - watersheds, forests, jungles or deserts. Our miniature ecosystems, individually or collectively, may help represent these larger systems and bioregions.
Testable Hypothesis: Biofirms Can Integrate Economy and Ecology
Our fourth testable hypothesis is that biofirms can integrate human economy and natural ecology within an interaction rights management system that maintains an open horizon.
Human economy is a curse and a blessing for natural ecology. Michael Tomasello argues that humans, as a species, are distinguished by joint intentionality, which means that we can opportunistically form a team, achieve a goal, divide the spoils fairly, and reform in ever new or overlapping teams. We not only have individual aspirations, but we can integrate them with collective aspirations. Our questioning, rational minds link together by way of languages, cultures, ideologies and legal systems that we imagine, multiplying our powers of learning as well as exploiting each other and all that surrounds us. Our investigating minds must restrain us, as by way of human rights. We must extend rights further to other living beings and to nature itself so that we succeed in restoring balance. At our best, we enrich our ecosystems, often unintentionally, as disruptors, opening up new niches, patterns, flows and signals, allowing species to develop more complex and resilient behavior. Also, intentionally, we love other living beings and our ecosystems, caring for them, protecting and restoring the environment, or being mindful as we transform it for our own purposes. Can we recognize the aspirations of other living beings and entire ecosystems, honor them and integrate them with our own? What is our role in nature? Can we catalyze harmony?
Biofirms are alternatives to firms as we know them, which are exploitative by design. Biofirms are like firms in that they are consequential human fictions, which can consist of people, institutions, capital, property, land, resources, procedures, flows, rights and relationships. Biofirms are set up so that they serve a bioregion and meaningfully represent and include all manner of life forms along with humans. Biofirms are themselves designed to be like natural organisms or ecosystems in that they are homeostatic agents, as understood by W. Ross Ashby, rebalancing themselves in response to perturbations, ever arriving at stability. Their purpose is simply to be what they are, and in that sense, they are free. Unlike firms, they are not primarily exploitative, nor fundamentally competitive, but can work together playfully to balance their resources and niches for the sake of the whole.
Working independently, biofirms have limited horizons, thus even with good intentions they can be destructive beyond what they see. An interaction rights managements system establishes conditions for composability of biofirms which has them work and play nice, regulate each other as needed, and maintain an open horizon, that is, stay open to including other such homeostatic agents, thus be receptive to signals from the environment, acknowledge and respect rights accordingly.
We conceive of an interaction rights management system as a conceptual framework of moral principles that humans can put into practice, that other biological agents generally observe and which software agents can operate by. Our hypothesis is that, in the theoretical framework of Active Inference, we can make explicit a generative model that is common to beings who seek harmony, collectively valuing individuality. Metaphorically, this is the software kernel for a collaborative culture, a template for the mission statements of any organization and its participants, and moreover, their accountability. We intend to work out these principles from the bottom up, by designing a supportive environment for the four teams of this proposal, and from the top down, by respecting the moral sense of every human participant, and in both directions, by proceeding minimalistically, keeping the principles as pure, simple, stable and few as we are able, respecting personal autonomy as we integrate our personal aspirations.
Daniel will lead our team of knowledge engineers in applying Active Inference to design this interaction rights management system, implement and modify it, explore and promote its functionality, and investigate its utility. They will connect our participants, software agents, artificial intelligence, social software, our community economics, our Theory Translator, our citizen scientists' notebooks and data, related social, ecological and economic opportunities, and other digital assets into a symbiotic interaction rights management system. Biofirms will grow concrete as the needs and opportunities become apparent.
Interaction rights management includes ecological rights and also human rights, including economic rights. Certain rights are inalienable, such as the right to rights. Whereas other rights can be voluntarily negotiated or compensated for after the fact, as in the case of overstepping or abuse, where industrialization by Western nations has caused climate change. Interaction rights management combines the economy and ecology of all sentient beings, all those that distill their surroundings, defining strong centers and clear boundaries, as described by architect Christopher Alexander and visionary economists Elinor Ostrom and Kate Raworth.
For humans, authenticity is the basis for stability. We each are unique, having our own relationship with truth, and our own deepest value in life, which seem to correlate, indicating where we stand like stars in the heavens, in the landscape of truth, in the universe of love. We each have our spiritual niche where we are the natural leaders. In our team, as befits our roles, we are:
| Relationship with truth | Deepest value in life | |
| Daniel Friedman | Truth as judgment, a determination about a referent within a context | Interaction |
| Andrius Kulikauskas | Truth as absolute view | Living by truth |
| Marcus Petz | Truth as experiencing diversely | Meaningful inclusion |
| Jere Northrop | Truth as aesthetic, a guiding principle of compassionate cooperation within the constraints of evidence | The Goldilocks Maximum Entropy Principle. Intuitive aesthetic judgment of what is "about right" to do the best you can and do no harm. |
Daniel will investigate whether our relationships with truth and our deepest values could serve as the basis of all interaction rights. Inspired by what we can say about ourselves as humans, we could assert that each creature has the right to a niche, a context, which may be larger or smaller, but is centered at the point they claim, and in that sense, is intended to overlap with all the universe, in harmony. We are thereby accountable for ourselves. We aspire to design an interaction rights management system that can integrate our niches, and manage our interaction rights for the sake of harmony. Likewise, we will engage our ecosystems and other beings, what are they at their core? We will practice caring for each other, integrating our body, mind, heart and will.
Preliminary ideas include making explicit our shared assumptions in nurturing and governing our commons.
- Our creative content enters the Public Domain whenever it does not explicitly state otherwise.
- We understand that money, as an external incentive, can bring people together, but it can't get people to care, which expresses an internal incentive.
- We wish for all to be successful, to thrive in their own niche as well as beyond it, and we welcome and include those who wish likewise.
- We wish for our accountability to be, first of all, to ourselves and how we define ourselves.
We thus assume that we wish to live freely, exercising our rights not for their own sake but only as needed for our authentic harmony. We nurture a sharing, caring, inclusive, diverse community, as humans and as friends of nature. We foster a culture of inclusivity, decentralized, as a patchwork compatible with other such patchworks, participating in the most universal, minimal, basic, inclusive, original culture of first principles, where the light of an underlying, all encompassing, boundless Love infers actively through each of us.
With all this in mind, considering our most enthusiastic citizen scientists, we will select at least one bioregion where we will organize a larger TimberFish Technologies unit, perhaps a pond or a mobile unit, which will be connected to the local community and local ecology. We will develop this as a social hub for community organizing, educational activities, artistic endeavors, experimenting with agricultural and business opportunities, and attracting interest in STEM disciplines, which is a challenge that universities and colleges face. Our interaction rights management system will connect this onsite hub with our global network, making transparent our aspirations, individual and collective, and connecting with local initiatives and ecological concerns, maintaining an open horizon.
In this bioregion, we will set up and play around with an experimental biofirm which serves it as a collective of agents, both human and nonhuman, including software agents, which operates under such principles, and serves a particular bioregion. We will evoke sentience, a flickering spirit in the biofirm, as its participants alternate in stepping in and stepping out. We will document instances where this biofirm takes actions to serve as a biological firewall, protecting a local bioregion from global exploitation, and also as a biological proxy, enabling a bioregion to represent itself with its ecological intelligence and be meaningfully included in our digital world.
Working With Enterprising Thought Leaders
Deliverables
The Active Inference Institute, given 12 months of funding at $100,000 per month, will organize 500 ongoing participants who bring to life four symbiotic public resources.
- At least 50 ongoing contributors for our Theory Translator, with essays on 20 conceptual structures, illustrated by 2,000 examples.
- At least 25 contributors to the theory underlying our Meaningful Inclusion Economy.
- At least 250 active participants in our Meaningful Inclusion Economy, helping others and receiving rewards.
- At least 100 bioregions in which one or more citizen scientist is sharing their findings in their experiments with miniature ecosystems.
- At least 50 active participants in our chosen bioregion where we organize or catalyze a larger ecosystem project.
- At least 50 ongoing contributors to our knowledge engineering team, working as coders, as online and onsite organizers, and as participants in creative projects related to the biofirm, our chosen bioregion as well as other bioregions.
These are benchmarks that quantify successes for these experimental projects. We are focused on ongoing participants but also expect to include five times as many one-time or occasional contributors.
We will see what works and what doesn't, what makes sense and what doesn't, what is false and what is true. We will take the opportunity to explore creatively promising ideas as they arise.
We will present our results at the next Applied Active Inference Symposium with presentations and demonstrations.
Team
Daniel Friedman leads this project
- Andrius Kulikauskas leads our work with citizen scientists
- Andrius Kulikauskas leads our team for our Theory Translator
- Marcus Petz leads our team for our Meaningful Inclusion Economy
- We will recruit an ecological aquarist to lead our team of citizen scientists
- Jere Northrop will consult on the use of TimberFish Technologies
- Daniel Friedman leads our team for engineering the biofirm and the interaction rights system
- Daniel Friedman leads our work with Enterprising Thought Leaders
Daniel Friedman (CV) received his PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology in 2019 from Stanford University for his study of red harvester ants. In 2023, he completed an NSF post-doc at UC Davis. He is the President of the Active Inference Institute, which he cofounded in 2020. He is an accomplished online community organizer, interviewer and moderator, interface designer, coder and knowledge engineer. As a researcher, he is interested in biology, art, philosophy, cognitive security, active inference, organizations, ants, systems, community, and complexity. Daniel and his wife Sasha live in Davis, California.
Andrius Kulikauskas (CV) received his PhD in Mathematics in 1993 from the University of California at San Diego. In his lifelong quest to know everything and apply that knowledge usefully, he documented a variety of conceptual structures which fit together as Wondrous Wisdom, a language of wisdom. From 1998 to 2010, he led Minciu Sodas, an online laboratory for serving and organizing independent thinkers. Since 2022, he leads Math 4 Wisdom, an investigatory community for absolute truth. In 2024, he and Jere Northrop cofounded Econet. Andrius was born in California and lives in Lithuania.
Marcus Petz (CV) received his PhD in Social and Public Policy in 2023 from the University of Jyväskylä for his research in community currency for rural renaissance. At Minciu Sodas, he led the working group on meaningful inclusion. He is currently a thought leader at Econet (www.e-c-o.net) exploring ideas around SyntroFi, community economics and developing the practical application of a method of inquiry using the language of Wondrous Wisdom. His academic interests extend to resilience, rural regeneration and heterodox thoughts on money and monetary innovation. Marcus was born in Mercia, UK, and lives in Finland with his wife Suvi and their children.
Jere Northrop received his PhD in Biophysics in 1969 from Syracuse University. Since then, as an inventor, he has pioneered ecotechnology in waste management, cofounding Bion Technologies and more recently, TimberFish Technologies. In parallel, he has developed the Relational Symmetry Paradigm and expressed that with an artificial language, ODODU. Since 2023, he leads the Language of Wisdom Study Group at Math 4 Wisdom. Jere and his wife Lynn live in Western New York State, where he was born.
Budget
The Active Inference Institute seeks $1,200,000 for this 12-month project. We can proceed in increments of $100,000. We are moving forward even without funding.
Given an increment of $100,000 in funding, we budget as follows.
Organizing Citizen Scientists
- $10,000 = 4 x $2,500 for part-time work by each of the four main leaders.
- $10,000 = 20 x $500 for each leader to have 5 assistants to help with training, organizing, coding, etc.
- $10,000 = 100 x $100 for 25 additional participants in each team in more specific leadership roles.
- $10,000 funds our community economics to motivate 500 ongoing participants and 2,000 incidental participants
- $10,000 for the Active Inference Institute for oversight and for the Symposium
- $10,000 to TimberFish Technologies for consulting and licensing
Working With Enterprising Thought Leaders
- $10,000 to Active Inference Institute for pursuing ideas of our Enterprising Thought Leaders
- $10,000 to Active Inference Institute for interfacing with their endeavors
Active Inference Institute general expenses
- $10,000 to Active Inference Institute for general expenses and general program.
- $10,000 to Active Inference Institute for research projects
We will fuel our team of citizen scientists with money in a reverse pyramid. We encourage people to participate voluntarily, working for free, and reward those who are self-motivated, show the most initiative, are the most helpful. We distribute our resources outward to include as many people as possible and to tap into their personal interests.
Similarly, we work with our Enterprising Thought Leaders symbiotically, directing our energies to make the most of shared interests.
TimberFish is selling and licensing its patent protected ecotechnology for commercial application in the US. However, because climate change and environmental destruction are global problems, the technology is free for the rest of the world. TimberFish takes this position because they believe that the US has had a disproportionate role in the creation of climate change and associated environmental problems and hence should bear a disproportionate amount of the cost of its remediation.
Enterprising Thought Leaders
Enterprising Thought Leaders is an advisory panel of the Active Inference Institute.
Enterprising Thought Leaders are successful entrepreneurs who contribute in increments of $10,000 or $100,000 yearly.
Enterprising Thought Leaders
- give their advice and ideas,
- make use of Active Inference Institute public resources in their own endeavors,
- speak to entrepreneurs about the relevance of the Active Inference Institute and its projects.
The Active Inference Institute
- receives their advice and ideas,
- expresses them in the language of Active Inference,
- takes their advice and pursues their ideas as opportune,
- facilitates the use of its public resources for their projects,
- invites participants to contribute to their projects,
- publishes their views in articles and videos,
- organizes public events where they interact,
- experiments with their ideas and reports any findings,
- reaches out to those who panel members suggest or recommend,
- in all of the above, infers, acts and serves.