Thomas Doctor

Authored papers (4)

• There is no self-evidence: A physics of emptiness realisation2026

  No finite agent can measure the entanglement entropy across its own boundary — this is the load-bearing result, proven by Fields and Glazebrook (2023, Corollary 3.1), from which the paper derives a formal account of Buddhist emptiness realisation. Because all of an agent's measurement operators act exclusively on the N-bit holographic screen B and have no access to the bulk state |B⟩, the agent cannot determine whether entanglement entropy S(|AB⟩) is zero (separable) or nonzero, rendering the self/environment partition permanently unevidenceable from the inside. The paper introduces the construct of the separation prior σ — a structural prior over the agent's quantum reference frame (QRF) deployments that constrains every measurement frame to respect a fixed B_self ∪ B_env sectorisation — and formalises it within the quantum free energy principle (qFEP) of Fields et al. (2022). Contemplative practice is modelled as progressive opacification of σ: as the practitioner builds a metacognitive model of their own QRF dynamics (formalised via the parametric-depth architecture of Sandved-Smith et al., 2021), σ transitions from transparent architectural constraint to explicit state-space variable, at which point Bayesian model reduction prunes it because ΔComplexity < 0 while ΔAccuracy ≈ 0. The post-dual agent optimises over the full QRF space Q rather than the restricted subspace Q_σ, yielding strictly lower variational free energy. The paper argues this implies that Buddhist awakening is neither the acquisition of a new metaphysical belief nor the dissolution of selfhood, but the embodied removal of an unevidenced constraint on inference — one whose removal simultaneously grounds a formal account of compassion as unbounded VFE minimisation and predicts a measurable shift toward critical neural dynamics in agents with stable emptiness realisation.

• 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 (12)

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