Goals

• Our scientific mission is to integrate a theory of sentience with other theories of nature.
• Our engineering mission is to develop technologies based upon successful theories.
• Our institutional goal is to establish a world-class international institute of scholarship, science and engineering focused on our missions.

§1 Our academic mission lies at the Foundations of Logic and Apprehension, with the creation of rigorous systematic models and the challenge of their formalization.

§2 Practically, our goal is to explain experience in nature, the evolution and the operation of senses, and to build machines that experience.

§3 This is a broad mandate that spans from the development of theory and engineering first principles to experiment, technological application and behavioral studies. Our success in these areas will provide contributions to mathematics, the natural sciences, and to medicine.

§4 Our objectives do not fit within the mandate of any single discipline today. We develop new theory and new engineering approaches founded upon a rigorous adherence to the philosophy of science, new empirical discoveries in biophysics and a requirement to understand an engineering of sentience and motility that extends beyond existing approaches.

§5 Our success will enable new technologies and potentially identify fundamental limits in current approaches. A successful effort will solve problems related to recognition, sensory modality and motility that have proven impossible or intractable today. The work lies at the convergence of the life sciences, semiconductor, and materials industries and they have broad strategic implications for our future.

§6 If we are successful and do identify an explanation for experience in nature, we will clearly change everything, for everyone. No-one will be untouched by it.

Giving to the Institute

§7 We plan a significant effort. We are raising funds to enable an endowment to meet our long term goal. This includes the establishment of a faculty run research establishment to meet these goals, a program of international research collaboration, and a continuing public education program. IASE is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization registered in California. Donations are tax-deductible in the USA to the full extent provided by law.

§8 The Institute is an independent and privately funded nonprofit corporation that relies upon private sources of funding. You can participate by giving generously to our program.

Motivations

§9 We are motivated initially by the identification of a starting point for this effort in my work. That work presents a theory of sentience able to make predictions about physiological structure. For an outline of this work see: SENSES.INFO.

§10 Our motivations can be summarized as follows:

1. It is necessary to take experience seriously as an existent property of nature.
2. A scientific explanation of experience in nature is both necessary and possible.
3. Existing functional or epiphenomenal explanations of experience are inadequate. Identity theories do not provide explanation.
4. Current theories fail because experience in these theories remains essentially supernatural. They provide no role for experience in the formation or action of physiological structures.
5. We can identify one theory that does provide a role for a potential basis of experience in the formation of physiological structures.
6. Our approach provides the basis of new discovery and explanation. It is, perhaps, the first available scientific theory of sentience.
7. New research in the life sciences offers the empirical basis for the development of new theories. In particular, they provide the means to provoke and verify new theories.
8. We can readily envision new technologies and devices constructed from successful theories. Such technologies provide verification of new theories by proof in practice.
9. Our investigations will be open minded, penetrating and logically constructive.
10. The quest has merit in its own right.

Implications

§11 The implications of such theories are broad and the strategic implications for new technology are significant. An understanding of how sentience is engineered and operates informs the natural sciences, the foundations of logic and, by extension, the foundations of mathematics. In particular, it promises conceptual advances, informs the physical and life sciences and it informs medicine. Ultimately it will enable the development of new technologies :

Conceptual Advances

• An explanation of how complexity arises and operates in nature.
• A refinement of the definition of "life" through the disclosure of the mechanisms behind it that led to sense and motility.
• An explanation of the engineering and operation of senses.
• The role that experience plays in the evolution of species.
• The fundamental limits of computation: explaining the limited results to be found in contemporary Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life and computational approaches to recognition.
• Provides the basis of a constructive development of a “natural ethics,” one that deals with the inevitable behaviors of organisms.
• Formal models of the mind.
• A new basis for logic and apprehension that has broad implications for mathematics and empirical science.

New Advances in Medical Science

• Provides insights into sensory and motility disorders.
• Informs the development of sensory prosthetics.
• Informs genetic models.
• Informs the development of bionics.

New Technology Developments

• Machine implementations of sensory modality allow us to solve the broad problems of recognition.
• Motile materials: for biomechanical applications such as flight and other natural motions.
• Autopoiesis: the construction of self-sustaining and self-organizing systems.
• Enhanced experience of memory: addressing the persistent fidelity of sensory record.
• Integration of existing technologies with biochemistry.

§12 We appreciate your review and encourage you to contact us for more information.

§13 Sincerely and with respect,

Dr. Steven Ericsson-Zenith.

Founder and Chairman

Sunnyvale, California. USA.

August 31st, 2008

♦

Concepts

Apprehension: Apprehension is the process of acquiring a Sign (an individuated experience). It involves the physical transduction of sense that leads to cognition and response.

experience: Here we refer to the common and most familiar basis of all senses.

scientific mission: The development of a logical construction of the world that approximates the way things are with increasing degrees of accuracy and completeness. To permit logical reduction within the framework of this construction that facilitates consistent and verifiable predictions. The failure of such reductions to lead necessarily to reconsideration and ultimately refinement of the construction, and not to supernatural conclusions. To be founded upon inductive empirical results and intelligent creative inspiration.