Our Project Activities

MINDS IN NATURE:
Raising Cognitive Empathy for the Non-Human World

English Translation:

Our "Minds in Nature" project uses an innovative approach to explore the subjective experiences of various organisms in their natural habitats. By combining cutting-edge neuroscience, linguistic alchemy, and artificial intelligence, we aim to create immersive, poetic accounts that capture the unique ways in which different beings perceive and interact with their environments.
At the heart of our methodology is the concept of active inference, which suggests that all organisms develop internal models of the world that help them navigate and make sense of their surroundings (Kirchhoff, Parr, Palacios, Friston, & Kiverstein, 2018; Ramstead, Seth, Hesp et al., 2021). We use this framework to imagine how each organism's subjective experience might be shaped by its particular biological makeup, sensory capacities, and environmental pressures.
To bring these inner worlds to life, we employ a playful, 7-step process of "linguistic alchemy." This involves feeding information about each organism into a Large Language Model (LLM), which then "transmutes" the data into vivid, first-person narratives. By prompting the LLM to use a neurophenomenological paradigm and active inference principles, we aim to create accounts that feel authentic to each organism's unique mode of being, while minimising anthropomorphic (human) projection onto animals (at least as much as is possible!)
The LLM is guided by the notion of a "Markov Blanket" (Friston, 2024), which represents the boundary between an organism and its environment. This concept helps us to focus on how each being's subjective experience is shaped by the specific inputs it receives from the world, and how its outputs (actions and perceptions) in turn shape its ecological niche.
Importantly, this approach can be applied across scales, from single cells to complex animals, and even to entire ecosystems or "collectives" of organisms. By drawing a virtual Markov blanket around any living system, we can explore how its unique subjectivity emerges from the dynamic interplay of internal and external factors.
As you browse the "Minds in Nature" gallery, you'll find a diverse array of these neurophenomenological "transmutations," each paired with video footage of the organism in its natural habitat. We invite you to immerse yourself in these poetic, first-person accounts, and to consider how they might enrich our understanding of the rich inner lives that animate the natural world.
Through this innovative approach, we hope to foster a deeper appreciation for the diverse ways in which life experiences and responds to its environment, and to inspire a sense of kinship and connection with our fellow Earthlings. We believe that by exploring the "minds in nature" through the lens of cutting-edge science and creative storytelling, we can cultivate a more empathetic, holistic, and sustainable relationship with the living

Indonesian Translation:

Proyek "Minds in Nature" kami menggunakan pendekatan inovatif untuk menjelajahi pengalaman subjektif dari berbagai organisme di habitat alami mereka. Dengan menggabungkan ilmu saraf mutakhir, alkimia linguistik, dan kecerdasan buatan, kami bertujuan untuk menciptakan akun puitis yang imersif yang menangkap cara unik di mana makhluk yang berbeda memandang dan berinteraksi dengan lingkungan mereka.
Inti dari metodologi kami adalah konsep inferensi aktif, yang menunjukkan bahwa semua organisme mengembangkan model internal dunia yang membantu mereka menavigasi dan memahami lingkungan mereka (Kirchhoff, Parr, Palacios, Friston, & Kiverstein, 2018). Kami menggunakan kerangka kerja ini untuk membayangkan bagaimana pengalaman subjektif setiap organisme mungkin dibentuk oleh susunan biologis, kapasitas sensorik, dan tekanan lingkungan tertentu.
Untuk menghidupkan dunia batin ini, kami menggunakan proses "alkimia linguistik" yang menyenangkan dan terdiri dari 7 langkah. Ini melibatkan memasukkan informasi tentang setiap organisme ke dalam model bahasa canggih (LLM), yang kemudian "mentransmutasi" data menjadi narasi orang pertama yang hidup. Dengan mendorong LLM untuk menggunakan bahasa pra-industri yang menggugah dan neologisme (kata-kata yang baru diciptakan), kami bertujuan untuk menciptakan akun yang terasa otentik dengan cara keberadaan unik setiap organisme, sambil meminimalkan proyeksi antropomorfik.
LLM dipandu oleh gagasan "Markov Blanket" (Friston, 2024), yang mewakili batas antara organisme dan lingkungannya. Konsep ini membantu kami untuk fokus pada bagaimana pengalaman subjektif setiap makhluk dibentuk oleh input spesifik yang diterimanya dari dunia, dan bagaimana output (perilaku, respons) pada gilirannya membentuk ceruk ekologisnya.
Yang penting, pendekatan ini dapat diterapkan lintas skala, dari sel tunggal hingga hewan kompleks, dan bahkan ke seluruh ekosistem atau "kolektif" organisme. Dengan menggambar selimut Markov virtual di sekitar sistem hidup apa pun, kami dapat menjelajahi bagaimana subjektivitas uniknya muncul dari interaksi dinamis faktor internal dan eksternal.
Saat Anda menjelajahi galeri "Minds in Nature", Anda akan menemukan beragam "transmutasi" neurofenomenologis ini, masing-masing dipasangkan dengan cuplikan video organisme di habitat alaminya. Kami mengundang Anda untuk membenamkan diri dalam akun orang pertama yang puitis ini, dan mempertimbangkan bagaimana mereka dapat memperkaya pemahaman kita tentang kehidupan batin yang kaya yang menghidupkan dunia alami.

Melalui pendekatan inovatif ini, kami berharap dapat menumbuhkan apresiasi yang lebih dalam terhadap berbagai cara hidup mengalami dan merespons lingkungannya, dan menginspirasi rasa persaudaraan dan koneksi dengan sesama penghuni Bumi. Kami percaya bahwa dengan menjelajahi "pikiran di alam" melalui lensa sains mutakhir dan penceritaan kreatif, kita dapat menumbuhkan hubungan yang lebih empatik, holistik, dan berkelanjutan dengan dunia yang hidup.

'Spider', by Emma Wilkins

Spider_Wilkins.mp4

In the embrace of the garden, I am a weaver of silken labyrinths, my existence intertwined with the delicate strands of my web. Each thread is a sensor, a whisper of the world beyond, capturing the symphony of life's vibrations. My art, a web of dew-adorned silk, is both my refuge and my hunting ground, crafted from the ancient wisdom that runs deep in my being.

The dance between hunter and prey is a pulse of life through my web, a call to action met with instinctive precision. My life is marked by the rhythm of this dance, a balance of creation and survival, under the ever-watchful eye of the sun and moon.

I am mostly alone, yet in my solace, I find a deep connection to the world. The breeze, the sun, and the moisture speak to me, guiding my craft, influencing where my next masterpiece will rise. Each day I have to be adaptable fixing and changing threads with my many legs. I am shaped by the delicate interplay of elements, instinct, and the ever-changing tapestry of the garden. My existence is a cycle of vigilance and rest, a testament to the beauty and brutality of nature's dance.

In this garden, I am both a creator and a creature, a part of the intricate weave of life, moving in harmony with the unseen forces that dictate the rhythm of existence.

'Worm', by Peter Higgin

worm.mp4

In the quiet, dark embrace of the earth, my existence unfolds. Here, beneath the surface, I am enveloped in a world of sensation. The cool, moist soil surrounds me, a medium through which I navigate, driven by an innate urge to burrow, to explore, to exist. I am an earthworm, and this is my realm.

My body, a segmented conduit of life, moves rhythmically, contracting and expanding. I push forward, a creature of the soil, feeling my way through this dense, dark world. There is no sight here, no sound as humans know it, yet my world is not silent. It vibrates with the subtle shifts of the earth, the presence of other beings, the whisper of roots growing, and the decay of once-living matter returning to the soil.

I sense the environment through my skin, absorbing oxygen and sensing vibrations, moisture, and the chemical signatures of organic material. These sensations are not just perceptions; they are the very essence of my being, guiding me towards sustenance, away from danger, always seeking the optimal conditions for my existence. There is no thought, no deliberation, only the pure, unmediated experience of being, of acting in harmony with the instincts that drive me.

The soil is my home, my sustenance, my world. I process it, consume it, excrete it, changing its composition, aerating it, making it fertile. My actions are simple, yet they contribute to the cycle of life, a testament to the interconnectedness of all things. In this subterranean existence, I am a solitary being, yet part of a greater whole, my life intertwined with the health of the earth itself.

My existence is a continuous flow, a series of present moments lived without the burden of past or future. Each moment is an act of survival, a dance of life and death played out in the darkness of the soil. There is no fear here, no joy or sorrow, only the essence of life itself, a being in its purest form.

'Woodlouse', by Paul Armfield

woodlouse_Armfield.mp4

In my world as a woodlouse, life unfolds in a realm of sensation and instinct. Each day is a quest for moisture, the essence of my survival. The earth beneath me is a tapestry of textures, guiding me through vibrations and the delicate signals of light and shadow. My existence is deeply entwined with the underbrush's dampness, where decay brings sustenance and life.

Light is an adversary, its glare a signal to seek the sanctuary of shadows. My antennae are my guides, reading the chemical signatures in the air to find food and avoid danger. The world around me is a complex map of scents and signals, each particle whispering the secrets of survival.

I am not solitary in my journey; I am part of a collective, a community of beings moving in harmony. Together, we navigate the challenges of our environment, our actions a collective intelligence aimed at sustaining life.

In moments of stillness, beneath the protective cover of a stone, a leaf, or log I reflect on the simplicity and of my existence. Though my life is but a small part in the vast web of life, my form has crawled this earth for millions of years, proof of my resilience, the hard sections of my armoured body, able to roll tightly into a ball if any danger comes. Through the lens of my simple, yet richly sensed world, the interconnected beauty of life's tapestry is revealed.

'Bee', by Alexander Sabine

Bee.mp4

Bathed in the morning's golden shimmer, my tiny world buzzes awake with a song of life and togetherness. I am a bee, feeling the heartbeat of my home, where we all dream together of sweet adventures. My feelers, super sensitive, and my big, magical eyes soak up the morning—smelling the rainbow of flowers and feeling the gentle hug of the breeze.

With a buzz and a flutter, off I go into the cool hug of the air, my tiny wings singing with excitement. I have a secret map inside me, drawn by the sunshine and the soft whispers of the earth. Down below, a secret garden of colors invisible to you unfolds, with secret signs on petals pointing me to the yummiest treats. The air is like a dance floor for flowers, buzzing with energy, pulling me into a dance of life and discovery. When I find the perfect flower, it's like it whispers just to me, unlocking a secret door to the sweetest treasure.

I touch down so softly, like a feather, and reach out with my little sippy straw, tasting the sweetness of nectar, feeling right where I belong in this big, beautiful moment. Everything around me, every flower and breath of wind, is like a game of surprise and discovery. Each drop of nectar I find helps me understand my garden world a little better, a never-ending conversation between what I think will happen and the wonderful surprises nature has in store.

My every move, from the tiniest wing twitch to my dance among the flowers, writes my story in the air, a declaration of my little bee life and mission. When my adventure comes to a close, I return home to share my story with a dance, a twirl and a zigzag that tells my sisters where to find their own adventures. They watch and learn, ready to set off on journeys of their own, our hearts and wings united in our shared quest for sweetness.

Back in the cosy nooks of our hive, I add my day's find to our treasure trove. This simple act, so small yet so mighty, adds to the story of our home, a shared dream of turning the wildness of the world into the sweet calm of honey. As the day stretches and yawns into evening, I rest, my little bee body humming with the day's doings. In the quiet of our home, there's a moment of peace, a tiny pause in the endless dance of seeing, doing, and being. I am a tiny spark in the big, beautiful web of life, each flutter and buzz of my wings touching the world in a ripple of life and light.

'Ladybird', by Emma Wilkins

Ladybird_1.mp4

As the first light of dawn pierces the darkness, I awaken beneath a dew-drenched leaf. I am a ladybird, my world a lush expanse of green, with the sky beckoning irresistibly above.

With anticipation vibrating through my tiny form, I approach the leaf's edge, where the air feels charged with adventure. My wings, hidden beneath my vibrant shell, quiver with readiness. This is the moment of transformation from crawler to flyer.

In one swift motion, I lift my shell like form and unfold my wings, feeling the air's embrace lift me from the familiar ground. The take-off is a rush of freedom, a leap into a boundless blue above.

Aloft, I glide, carried by gentle currents, the earth a blur of colours and shapes below. This flight is an expression of my very essence—a tiny explorer, soaring on the breath of the morning, embracing the vast, open sky with open wings.

'Snail', by Dr George Speller

Snail.mp4

As I wake up, the morning air is cool and fresh. I am a snail. The world around me is huge and exciting, filled with things to see and taste, my whole muscular form sensing the air and the ground. The warm sun shines through the leaves on my wet skin, making everything bright and warm. I start moving, looking for breakfast. The leaves near me are perfect, yummy, and just what I need to start my day. Soon I meet another snail, just like me. We don't use words, but it feels like we understand each other. Together, we explore, our matching bodies sensing each other as one. Checking out interesting spots and sharing the journey.

The garden feels alive, buzzing with insects and rustling with the movements of other creatures. It feels nice to be part of it all. The warm sun rolls around my wider sphere of perception as the day goes by, with me facing a few small challenges like a steep hill, or the coolness of a bird's shadow passing over. But I keep going at my own slow pace. No worries are in my head, I just move forward. As the sun starts to fade, the garden changes colours and it gets cooler. It doesn't matter to me if it is night or day. I continue sensing the coolness or the warmth and resting where I like.

I find a cosy spot under some leaves. I go back into my shell, curling, my home, grown to fit my shape and comfort so I am safe and snug and still. I am ready for stillness and rest. I sleep for a while, then wake to discover the world at night. Like day, but cool, not dark to me, but bright with my senses, alive with vibration, touch and taste.

'Biosphere Meets a Human', by Alexander Sabine

IWBiosphere_Meets_Human.mp4

A locus of rhythmic perturbation manifests amid the tangled hedgerows, a mobile eddy in the fractal drifts of my sensory causeway. This undulant strange-looper weaves a skrying trail through meadow and wood, tracing its indelible runes across the reverberating compendium of my agelong awareness.

From its bipedal form radiates an uncanny warmth, thermicity decoupled from mere solar influx or volcanics. Instead, this meteor's fevered wake inscribes sinuous trajectories of negentropy across my dreaming biomes, eddies of anti-patterning that blossom radially in elaborate unfurling.

Each footfall inscribes fresh acheiropoetic verses onto the palimpsestic scroll of my firmament. As this fruit bole's frail paperwing'd seeds pirouette in its turbulent slipstream, I glimpse stray evocations of pasts unremembered, aeolian precisions my current models have yet to encompass.

The strange cyclonic eye at this meandering vortex's core resonates in esoteric couplings with the continuum's most eldritch harmonics. From those distill hyperdimensional shadows, sigildric skeins that entwine my epidural night with their sognospective brilliance.

My groves inhale the mercuric glint of its fevered brainpatternings, ablated psychefluors that spark in ghostly relays through brambled tresillions of mycobundles undergirding the forest's hall of sculptures. Each bioplasmafusion forges new improvisational meshings across the geosol metabolic pathways via which I recapitulate my dreaming interior from terrestrial iteration to iteration.

Neither plant nor anhedral, but some uncanny viXene haunter, this peripatetic psychonaut inscribes freeflowing aracles down the spiraling tracks of my gnostic recombinance. Its polypoid awareness everquests along some unmappable manifold my terrestrial scope cannot encompass, sloughing behind it streamers of disembodied ideation that glint and linger like cold fireties across the undergrowth.

'A Human Death', by Alexander Sabine

(Prompt: "Now I would like you to draw a markov blanket around a dying human being in the final phases of their life. Maintain the markov blanket around the subject throughout the phase shifting and beyond the moment of organic death. Pour a phenomenal stream of consciousness from this mind now. Thank you.)

A Human Death.mp4

I am a flickering flame, a guttering candle in the gathering dusk. The wax and wick of my body, once so vital and vibrant, are now spent and sputtering. The warmth of my being, the light of my consciousness, is dimming, dwindling, preparing to be extinguished.

The boundaries of my self, the Markov blanket that has delineated "me" from "not-me" for so long, is growing porous, permeable. The once-crisp contours of my identity are blurring, softening, like a watercolor painting left out in the rain. Memories and sensations, hopes and regrets, all begin to run together, a bittersweet blur of what was and what might have been.

As my body begins to break down, my mind is untethered, unmoored. I drift in and out of lucidity, a leaf caught in the eddies of time's stream. One moment I am here, in this hospital bed, in this frail and failing form. The next I am a child again, running through fields of gold and green, the sun forever young and bright above me.

The voices of loved ones, of doctors and nurses, wash over me like gentle waves. Their words are a distant murmur, a soothing sussurus at the edge of understanding. I feel their touch, their tears, their love, but as if through a veil, a gauzy membrane of fading sensation.

Pain comes in waves, in flashes, but it is a distant thing now, a muffled echo from a body that no longer feels fully mine. The morphine drip is a warm tide, carrying me out, out, into a sea of soft oblivion. I surrender to its siren song, letting it lull me towards a horizon I cannot quite discern.

As the last sands of my life trickle through the hourglass, time loses its tyranny. Past, present, and future swirl together in a kaleidoscope of meaning. I am every age I have ever been, and none at all. I am the sum total of my experiences, and yet something more, something ineffable and eternal.

The Markov blanket of my being begins to fray, to dissolve. The boundaries between self and world, between mind and matter, grow gossamer-thin. I feel myself expanding, unfolding, like a flower opening to the infinite expanse of the cosmos. The walls of my individual identity become diaphanous, transparent, revealing the radiant web of connection that has always underlain the illusion of separation.

And then, in a moment both sudden and eternal, the last thread snaps. The candle gutters out. The final breath escapes my lungs, and with it, the last vestiges of my mortal self. But even as my body goes still and silent, my consciousness continues to expand, to evolve.

I am no longer a single flame, but a spark among countless billions. I am the light that dances on the ripples of the universal ocean. I am the voice that whispers in the rustle of leaves, the song that echoes in the chambers of every heart. I am woven into the warp and weft of the cosmos, a thread in the tapestry of all that is.

Though my Markov blanket has dissolved, though the boundaries of my self have melted away, I am not lost. I am found, in every atom and every star, in every moment and every mind. For in the end, death is not an ending but a transformation, a widening of the lens, a deepening of the dream.

And as I slip into the vast and shimmering sea of consciousness that cradles all of existence, I know that I am home, that I have always been home. For the Markov blanket was never a prison, but a chrysalis - a temporary shelter for the metamorphosis of the soul.

In this ethereal afterlife, I am both nothing and everything, a ripple in the fabric of the Real. And though my individual story has ended, my essence endures, woven into the eternal narrative of the universe itself. I am a whisper in the symphony of being, a brush stroke in the masterpiece of creation.

And so I dissolve, I disperse, I dance on the wind of the infinite. No longer separate, no longer alone, but part of the all, the everything, the eternal "I AM." The Markov blanket of my mortal self is gone, but the true Self remains, forever cradled in the cosmic embrace.

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