Olaf Witkowski

Authored papers (3)

• Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: stress, care, and intelligence2023

  merged
• Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence2022

  Care—defined as concern for the alleviation of stress (the delta between current and optimal states)—is proposed as the substrate-independent invariant that unifies biology, Buddhist philosophy, and artificial intelligence in explaining how intelligence scales. The paper introduces the Care Light Cone (CLC) formalism, a spatiotemporal representation adapted from relativistic light cone geometry, which maps the boundary of states any agent can represent, pursue, and work to modify, distinguishing it from the Physical Light Cone (PLC) that maps merely achievable physical states. Across embodiments ranging from bacterial biofilms navigating metabolic space to Xenobots (protoorganisms made of frog skin cells) exhibiting coherent behavior without evolutionary backstory, to hybrots and cyborgs integrating living brain tissue with artificial bodies, the size of an agent's CLC directly indexes its cognitive sophistication. Cancer is reframed as a pathological contraction of the CLC caused by inappropriate reduction of gap junctional connectivity, reverting cells to ancient unicellular stress-reduction loops. The Bodhisattva vow—'for the sake of all sentient life, I shall achieve awakening'—is operationalized as a design principle that formally extends a system's CLC to infinite spatiotemporal scope, triggering a positive feedback loop between expanding Care and expanding intelligence analogous to major evolutionary transitions such as the archaea-eubacteria fusion producing eukaryotic cells. The paper argues this implies that outward-directed Care is not merely ethically desirable but mechanistically necessary for the development of artificial general intelligence, and that moral obligation toward any being—chimeric, synthetic, or evolved—should be calibrated to the scope of Care that being can exhibit, rather than to its material composition or phylogenetic origin.

• Can Being Aware of the Illusion of Self Augment an Agent's Affordances: Integrating Buddhist Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Artificial Life2021

  Awareness of the illusion of self — drawn from Buddhist 'no-self' (anātman) doctrine, contemplative neuroscience, and lucid dreaming research — can expand an agent's affordances, and this claim is amenable to formal modeling via artificial life frameworks. The paper's central move is to map three convergent domains: Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy (specifically Maitreya-Asaṅga's rejection of singular, enduring selves), empirical findings linking 'selfing'-reduction practices to increased social connectedness (Hutcherson, Seppala & Gross, 2008) and prosocial behavior (Luberto et al., 2018 meta-analysis), and artificial life tools including predictive information (Bialek, 2001), empowerment (Klyubin et al., 2008), and integrated information (Tononi et al., 1994). The proposed integrative framework — which the paper terms an artificial life model of illusory selfhood — uses toy cognitive systems to simulate the effects of reduced self-reification without requiring direct interaction with meditating humans, thereby disentangling causal mechanisms. Lucid dreaming, documented to alter environmental affordances by enabling actions unavailable in waking life (Tholey, 1989), serves as a second empirical anchor alongside contemplative practice. The paper argues this implies that non-human intelligences in AI and artificial life, if designed or trained to treat selfhood as distributed and dynamic rather than fixed, may access qualitatively novel ranges of action — potentially yielding new fundamental principles for AI science and new categories of technology.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

Their work is cited by (2)

• Toward an ethics of autopoietic technology: Stress, care, and intelligence1× refs
• Contemplative Agent1× refs

Recent mentions (11)

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