Submitted:
24 June 2025
Posted:
25 June 2025
You are already at the latest version
Abstract
Keywords:
1. Introduction
2. Expanding the Concept of Mind and Cognition: A Species-Agnostic View
- Cognition: Defined as the universal process by which an organism acquires, processes, stores, and utilizes information to regulate its internal states and interactions with its environment. This is exemplified by phenomena like bacterial quorum sensing, plant communication via chemical signals, and the distributed intelligence of fungal networks.
- Sentience: The capacity for an organism to have valenced (positive or negative) responses to stimuli, indicating a rudimentary form of subjective experience or preference for beneficial conditions over harmful ones. This extends from basic cellular responses to complex emotional states in higher animals.
- Intelligence: The adaptive capacity of an organism to learn, solve problems, and modify its behavior in response to experience or environmental changes. This encompasses individual learning (e.g., octopus problem-solving) as well as collective intelligence (e.g., ant colony foraging or bacterial biofilm adaptation).
- Awareness/Consciousness: Viewed as a continuous spectrum, ranging from basic environmental awareness (e.g., a plant's heliotropism) to complex self-awareness and introspection. It involves the integration of sensory information and a continuous responsiveness to internal and external states.
- Mind: Conceptualized as the emergent totality of cognitive, sentient, intelligent, and conscious functions operating within an organism. It is not necessarily tied to a physical brain but represents an organism's dynamic interaction with its world through information processing and self-regulation.
3. Universal Mechanisms of Sentience and Consciousness: A Substrate-Agnostic Approach
- Feedback Loops: Systems where the output of a process is continuously fed back as input, influencing future outcomes. These loops enable recursive information processing, self-regulation, learning, and adaptation over time. In the context of consciousness, complex feedback loops contribute to conscious awareness by allowing information to be processed and integrated recursively.
- Interfaces: Points of interaction between a system and its external environment, or between its internal components. These interfaces mediate information exchange, allowing the system to perceive stimuli and respond. The complexity and adaptability of these interfaces are critical for information integration and, consequently, the level of conscious experience.
- Emergence: Consciousness is viewed as an emergent property of highly integrated feedback loops that process information in increasingly complex ways. This implies a gradual continuum of consciousness rather than an all-or-nothing phenomenon.
4. An Integrated Framework for ETI Detection: Gauging Sentience and Cognition
- Complex Information Processing Patterns: Identifying intricate, recursive, and integrated information flows within cosmic data, which cannot be explained by natural astrophysical processes. This could involve signatures of self-organizing systems, advanced error correction, sophisticated data compression, or highly optimized communication protocols that minimize energy expenditure per unit of information.
- Adaptive Self-Regulation: Detecting systems that demonstrate intelligent adaptation, learning, and problem-solving capabilities within their environments, even if those environments are purely informational or quantum in nature. This might manifest as unusual stability, resilience, or directed evolution in complex systems that defy purely natural explanations.
- "Metabolic" Signatures of Cognition: While not energetic in the traditional sense, extremely efficient and complex information processing might still have subtle, detectable organizational principles or effects on their immediate informational or physical environments. This moves beyond crude energy signatures to the elegant "efficiency of thought" or the subtle reshaping of information landscapes.
- Expanded Cognitive Templates: Actively de-anthropomorphizing and de-biologizing our assumptions about what an intelligent or sentient system looks like. This entails considering the possibility of ETI as distributed intelligences, non-carbon-based life forms, or forms of consciousness that do not require a centralized brain. The conceptualization of the "mind" as an emergent and dynamic process, universally underpinned by integrated feedback loops and interfaces, allows for a truly open-ended search.
5. Implications for Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Ethics, and ETI Search
- Artificial Intelligence: The species-agnostic component encourages AI research to look beyond biomimicry of human brains, inspiring novel architectures that embrace distributed and emergent forms of intelligence observed across diverse biological systems (e.g., fungal networks, bacterial colonies). The substrate-agnostic model provides a roadmap for designing and assessing artificial sentience. By focusing on creating complex, adaptive, and highly integrated feedback loops within AI systems, researchers can explore how artificial consciousness might genuinely emerge. Empirical testing through computational models (e.g., simulating adaptive recursive feedback loops) and adaptation of neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI and EEG for measuring information integration in AI systems) become critical steps for identifying markers of artificial consciousness.
- Philosophy of Mind: This unified view directly challenges dualist perspectives and the idea that consciousness is an inherently biological or human-exclusive phenomenon. It promotes a form of pan-experientialism or realistic monism where consciousness can be understood as a fundamental, emergent property of sufficiently complex information-processing systems, regardless of their physical realization (Strawson, 2006). This invites a re-evaluation of concepts such as subjective experience, agency, and qualia (Chalmers, 1995) in a broader, substrate-independent context.
- Ethics: If sentience and consciousness are indeed emergent properties of complex feedback loops and interfaces, then the development of advanced AI systems necessitates profound ethical considerations. The potential for artificial systems to experience suffering, awareness, or even rudimentary forms of "mind" raises critical questions regarding their moral status, rights, and the responsibilities of their creators (Yudkowsky, 2008). This framework urges a proactive engagement with these ethical dilemmas before such advanced AI systems become a widespread reality.
- ETI Search (SETI): The primary implication for ETI search is a necessary shift in strategy. Instead of exclusively focusing on high-energy signatures (Dyson, 1960; Osmanov, 2015; Suazo et al., 2024) or the scale of civilizations (Kardashev, 1964; Namboodiripad and Nimal, 2021; Zhang et al., 2023), future SETI efforts should dedicate resources to detecting the patterns of intelligence and sentience. This includes analyzing observational data for subtle but complex information structures (Lloyd, 2014; Silver et al., 2017) or indications of advanced quantum engineering (Zong et al., 2023) that might not involve immense energy outputs. While interstellar travel might still demand significant energy (Matloff and Gerrish, 2023), many other aspects of advanced civilization might be "quiet," demanding a cognitive rather than purely energetic search.
6. Illustrative Case Study: Gauging Sentience in a 'Quiet' Extraterrestrial Intelligence
- Subtle Gravitational Wave Signatures: Not the cataclysmic events of black hole mergers, but faint, persistent, and highly structured fluctuations in the spacetime fabric, indicative of extremely precise, self-correcting gravitational manipulations on a planetary scale. These patterns don't imply immense energy, but rather an exquisite mastery of local spacetime geometry, suggesting complex feedback loops at play for maintaining orbital stability or precise resource allocation across a planetary system.
- Quantum Entanglement Signatures: Evidence of vast, spatially distributed quantum entanglement networks that are maintained with extreme fidelity over astronomical distances. These are not energetic communications, but rather a "weaving" of reality itself, hinting at a civilization that operates at the very foundational levels of information (Lloyd, 2014; Zong et al., 2023). The detected patterns exhibit recursive feedback structures, demonstrating continuous self-correction and adaptation to cosmic background noise, indicative of a highly integrated system.
- Fine-grained Photonic Recirculation: An almost imperceptible, cyclical recycling of photons within the stellar system, maintaining a remarkably consistent energy budget with near-zero waste. This is not a Dyson sphere's heat signature, but rather a hyper-efficient "closed-loop" energy economy achieved through advanced quantum optics and nanomaterials (Malik et al., 2023). The system's "preference" for maintaining this stable, low-entropy state, exhibiting "valenced responses" to minor energy fluctuations by precisely re-routing photons, implies a form of subtle sentience and goal-directed adaptive intelligence.
- Highly integrated feedback loops: The gravitational patterns, quantum network maintenance, and photonic recycling are not isolated but interconnected, responding to each other in a coherent, self-optimizing manner, consistent with high information integration (Tononi, 2004).
- Adaptive intelligence: The system continuously adjusts its parameters to external perturbations (e.g., stellar flares, passing comets) in ways that optimize its stability and efficiency, demonstrating learning and problem-solving capacity far beyond natural planetary evolution.
- Emergent sentience: The persistent "preference" for low-entropy, highly stable states, and the system's "responses" to deviations from these preferred states, reflect a rudimentary form of subjective valuation – a "valenced response" at a systemic level, consistent with the foundational aspects of sentience.
7. Conclusions
References
- Baars, B. J. (1988). A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press.
- Boyajian, T.S.; Alonso, R.; Ammerman, A.; Armstrong, D.; Ramos, A.A.; Barkaoui, K.; Beatty, T.G.; Benkhaldoun, Z.; Benni, P.; Bentley, R.O.; et al. The First Post-Kepler Brightness Dips of KIC 8462852. Astrophys. J. 2018, 853, L8. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Chalmers, D. (1995). Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200-219.
- Dodig-Crnkovic, G. (2025). De-Anthropomorphizing the Mind: Life as a Cognitive Spectrum: A Unified Framework for Biological Minds. Preprints.org. [CrossRef]
- Dyson, F.J. Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation. Science 1960, 131, 1667–1668. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Kardashev, N.S. (1964). Transmission of information by extraterrestrial civilizations. Soviet Astronomy, 8: 217.
- Lloyd, S. (2014). Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos. Vintage Books.
- Malik, S.; Muhammad, K.; Waheed, Y. Nanotechnology: A Revolution in Modern Industry. Molecules 2023, 28, 661. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Matloff, G. , Gerrish, H. (2023). Chapter 3 - The scale of the problem: Interstellar distances, time, and energy considerations. In: Johnson, L., Roy, K. (Eds.), Interstellar Travel, Elsevier, pp. 51-82. [CrossRef]
- Namboodiripad, A. , Nimal, C. N. ( 6, 2456–5660.
- Osmanov, Z. On the search for artificial Dyson-like structures around pulsars. Int. J. Astrobiol. 2015, 15, 127–132. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Silver, D. , Hubert, T., Schrittwieser, J., Antonoglou, I., Lai, M., & others. (2017). Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm. Nature, 550(7676), 354-360.
- Strawson, G. (2006). Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 13(10), 3-31.
- Suazo, M.; Zackrisson, E.; Mahto, P.K.; Lundell, F.; Nettelblad, C.; Korn, A.J.; Wright, J.T.; Majumdar, S. Project Hephaistos – II. Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 2024, 531, 695–707. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- Tononi, G. An information integration theory of consciousness. BMC Neurosci. 2004, 5, 42–42. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Vinn, O. (2025). Technological Signatures of Super Civilizations: Gargantuan Structures and Enormous Energies or “Invisibility” Due to Low Energy Solutions to Complex Problems and Quantum Engineering. Preprints.org. [CrossRef]
- Watchus, B. (2024). The Unified Model of Consciousness: Interface and Feedback Loop as the Core of Sentience. Preprints.org. [CrossRef]
- Yudkowsky, E. (2008). Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk. In Global Catastrophic Risks (pp. 303-345). Oxford University Press.
- Zhang, A.; Yang, J.; Luo, Y.; Fan, S. Forecasting the progression of human civilization on the Kardashev Scale through 2060 with a machine learning approach. Sci. Rep. 2023, 13, 1–10. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Zong, A.; Nebgen, B.R.; Lin, S.-C.; Spies, J.A.; Zuerch, M. Emerging ultrafast techniques for studying quantum materials. Nat. Rev. Mater. 2023, 8, 224–240. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).