Tame Technological Approach To Mind Everywhere

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

  implementsintroduces
• Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence

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• Brains and where else? Mapping theories of consciousness to unconventional embodiments

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• Koan Battery: Measuring Reflective Mode Accessibility in AI

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• World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence

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• Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligence

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• Michael Levin

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• Daniel Dennett

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  Philosopher whose Intentional Stance is adapted and extended by TAME framework.
• Chris Langton

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• Collective Intelligence

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  Recognition that selves are composite systems of competent parts; all intelligences are higher-level selves made of cells or components.
• Cognitive Light Cone

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  Concept defining self by the spatiotemporal scale and nature of goals a system can pursue; limits of concern demarcate identity.
• Bioelectricity

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  Proposed 'cognitive glue' common to both neural and developmental collective intelligence; implemented by ion channels and electrical synapses.
• Consciousness

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  Core concept: capacity to experience as a subject; argued to be substrate-independent and achievable across diverse biological systems.
• Goal-Directedness

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  Proposed universal invariant of cognition and intelligence—capacity for goal-directed activity in a problem space, independent of substrate or embodiment.
• Teleonomy

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  Goal-directed behavior framework; referenced in plant cognition context.
• Goal-Directed Activity

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  Central property of agency: energy expended to reach specific states despite disturbances.
• Stress as the Glue of Agency

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  Stress is a systemic response to setpoint deviations that scales up homeostatic loops and binds subunits into a larger Self.
• Persuadability (Axis of Persuadability)

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  A continuum of agency from brute force micromanagement to persuasion by rational argument, used to determine the optimal intervention strategy for any system.
• Plasticity of biological Self

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• Continuum of cognitive capacities

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  Core TAME tenet that cognitive capacities form a continuum without binary bright lines, essential for gradualist approach.
• Space of Possible Bodies and Minds

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  Vast option space of designed and evolved combinations of living, non-living, and software components at all scales; future diverse intelligences will be chimeric mixes far beyond natural phylogeny.
• Cognition (TAME definition)

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  Activities of a Self that gather, process, and act on information for adaptive action.
• Regenerative Medicine

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  Medical field that will confront philosophical problems of personal identity and agency when deploying stem cell therapies.
• Axis of Persuasability

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  A continuous scale from brute-force control to rational persuasion that defines the degree of agency of a system.
• Consciousness (TAME definition)

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  First-person phenomenal experience; what it is like to be that Self, a continuum.
• Mind (TAME definition)

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  The functional, dynamic aspect of a Self resulting from all cognitive and somatic activities.
• Biological computation (scale-inseparable, hybrid dynamics)

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• Chimeric Bioengineering

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  The creation of novel cognitive systems by combining evolved and designed components, driving the need for TAME.
• Embodied Mind

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  Philosophical position that minds are dependent on plastic material substrates that change during lifetime and evolution.
• Intelligence (TAME definition)

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  The functional ability to solve problems in various spaces, not tied to specific implementations.
• Stress (TAME definition)

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  A system-level state driving homeostatic loops, whose scale indicates cognitive sophistication.
• Agency (TAME definition)

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  Properties of decision-making and adaptive action; the degree to which a system requires higher-level models.
• Gradualism

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  Core TAME pillar rejecting binary categories for cognition; treating all cognitive properties as continuous spectra.

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• Multiscale Cognition

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• Bioelectric Cognition

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• Morphogenesis is an example of basal cognition, a collective intelligence of cells navigating morphospace.

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  Asserts that developmental biology can be understood through the lens of problem-solving and cognitive concepts.
• Selves are not fixed permanent agents; the substrate of memory, preferences, and rewards is plastic and can remodel during the agent's lifetime.

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  Central claim that cognitive Selves change in real-time, supported by examples of metamorphosis and regeneration.
• There is no binary distinction between 'true cognition' and 'just physics'—only continuous variation in cognitive capacity.

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  Core interpretive position of TAME: gradualism replaces categorical thinking about agency and cognition.
• There is no clear bright line demarcating true cognition from metaphorical as-if cognition; cognition exists on a continuum.

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  Core TAME claim rejecting binary categories; supported by evolutionary biology and recent bioengineering.
• Consciousness also comes in degrees and kinds, consistent with the gradualist framework; there may be no true zero.

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  TAME's implication that sentience accompanies goal-directed activity, with minimal versions present in particles and scaling up in organized systems.
• Goal-directed activity as core of Self

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• The ability to pursue goals is the core of being a Self.

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  Goal-directed activity is proposed as the central invariant for all Selves across substrates.
• The economy is a collective intelligence with autonomous multi-scale elements exhibiting adaptive problem-solving

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  Central thesis: economy exemplifies collective intelligence; justifies economic analysis via TAME framework
• No Privileged Material Substrate for Mind

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  Minds not exclusively neural; basal cognition identifies intelligences in single cells, plants, tissues, swarms; brains pre-date neurons evolutionarily.
• Selves can be nested and overlapping, cooperating and competing both laterally and across levels.

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  Key TAME claim that biological systems are patchworks of agents, with higher Selves deforming option spaces for lower ones.
• The correct level of agency for a system is an empirical question determined by which intervention strategy provides the most efficient prediction and control.

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  Central methodological claim of TAME: optimal position on the persuadability continuum is found through experiments, not philosophical definition.
• Estimates of intelligence are observer-dependent and depend on the observer's limitations as much as the system.

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  An epistemological claim of TAME that agency is not an objective property but is empirically determined by prediction and control efficiency.
• Goals and stressors are key invariants unifying cognitive systems across diverse embodiments.

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  Levin's assertion that goal-directed activity is the unifying principle across morphogenesis, behavior, and physiological allostasis.
• There is no privileged material substrate for Selves; cognition can arise in neurons, single cells, plants, tissues, swarms, and engineered systems.

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  Second foundational pillar of TAME; supports basal cognition and rejects brain-centrism.
• Gradualism in Cognitive Capacity

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  No sharp boundary between true cognition and mere physics; continuous series of forms connects any cognitive system with humbler proto-cognitive ones via evolution and bioengineering.

• Active Inference

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  Foundational framework by Karl Friston; the paper extends it to three hierarchical levels for modeling meta-awareness.
• Basal Cognition

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  An interdisciplinary research framework that reconceptualizes intelligence as observer-relative problem-solving competencies existing on a continuum from simple to highly complex, extending cognition beyond neural systems to pre-neural and non-neural substrates including microbial control loops, plants, tissues, and cellular collectives. It grounds the study of evolutionary and developmental origins of cognitive and behavioral capacities by linking information processing at the chemical and cellular level to classical cognition, and provides philosophical foundations for understanding agency and goal-directedness in systems without nervous systems.
• Autopoiesis

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  Maturana-Varela principle of self-maintaining systems that organize themselves through internal feedback; extended here to biological, technological, and hybrid systems.
• Multiscale Competency Architecture

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  A framework originating from Levin that formalizes how hierarchical biological systems—from cells to tissues to organs—exhibit integrated problem-solving and adaptive plasticity across multiple levels of organization (metabolic, transcriptional, physiological, anatomical). It models system-level behaviors as emergent from competition and cooperation among heterogeneous subunits within composite agents, explaining how goals and regulations scale across biological scales.
• Free Energy Principle

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  A foundational variational principle from statistical physics that formalizes how self-organizing systems maintain structural integrity and adapt to their environment by minimizing free energy—a mathematical bound on surprise or prediction error. Originally developed by Karl Friston, the framework unifies action, perception, and learning as processes of active inference, where systems both update internal models of the world and act upon it to reduce the divergence between predictions and observations.
• Diverse Intelligence

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  Research program studying intelligence at multiple scales and substrates; proposed as relevant to implications of mnemonic improvisation.
• Stress Care Intelligence Loop

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• Xenobots

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  Synthetic biotic constructs made from repurposed frog embryo skin cells that form self-motile robots with novel morphologies and behaviors including kinematic self-replication; demonstrate cellular competency beyond normal developmental constraints.
• Embodied cognition

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  Framework treating cognition as inseparable from bodily organization and environmental interaction; aligned with biogenic approach.
• Bioelectric Code

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• Intentional Stance

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  Dennett's framework adopted and extended by TAME to make agency attribution empirical and observer-dependent.
• Axis Of Persuadability

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  Practical engineering framework for determining optimal level of control for a given system, from brute force to rational argument.
• Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL)

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  A proposed marker of consciousness and cognitive transition discussed by Ginsburg and Jablonka.
• Rosen's (M,R) Systems / Anticipatory Systems

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  A theoretical framework for systems that anticipate and act on future states, mentioned as complementary.

• Levin 2022 Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere

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  Source paper introducing the TAME framework and its applications.
• Levin & Lyons (2026) Cognitive glues are shared models of relative scarcities: the economics of collective intelligence

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  The research paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, proposing a cognitive glue concept grounded in economic price systems.
• Levin M (2022) Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: An Experimentally-Grounded Framework for Understanding Diverse Bodies and Minds

  introduces
  The source paper introducing the TAME framework, published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience.
• Core tenets of TAME as listed in Table 1

  about
  Summary of the philosophical pillars of TAME: continuum, diverse intelligences, persuadability, plastic Selves, nested Selves, intelligence as space-agnostic competency.

• Goals and Stressors as Unifying Invariants

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  Goals (cybernetic sense) and stressors (distance from goals) proposed as deep invariants allowing comparison of agents in diverse embodiments across morphogenesis, behavior, and allostasis.
• Scaling of Cognitive Capacity via Modularity and Feedback Loops

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  Processes scaling goals and stressors form positive feedback loop with modularity; both arise from and potentiate power of evolution, enabling specific predictions for cognitive capacity scaling.

• Multiple ways to implement and infer Consciousness (Rouleau & Levin, 2023)

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  Commentary on Segundo-Ortin & Calvo (2023) arguing for plant sentience via multiple realizability and substrate independence, published in Animal Sentience.

• What are the deep invariants unifying cognitive systems across diverse substrates?

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