Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME): an experimentally- grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds

Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These advances are disrupting familiar concepts in the philosophy of mind, and require new ways of thinking about and comparing truly diverse intelligences, whose composition and origin are not like any of the available natural model species. In this Perspective, I introduce TAME - Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere - a framework for understanding and manipulating cognition in unconventional substrates. TAME formalizes a non-binary (continuous), empirically-based approach to strongly embodied agency. When applied to regenerating/developmental systems, TAME suggests a perspective on morphogenesis as an example of basal cognition. The deep symmetry between problem-solving in anatomical, physiological, transcriptional, and 3D (traditional behavioral) spaces drives specific hypotheses by which cognitive capacities can scale during evolution. An important medium exploited by evolution for joining active subunits into greater agents is developmental bioelectricity, implemented by pre-neural use of ion channels and gap junctions to scale cell-level feedback loops into anatomical homeostasis. This architecture of multi-scale competency of biological systems has important implications for plasticity of bodies and minds, greatly potentiating evolvability. Considering classical and recent data from the perspectives of computational science, evolutionary biology, and basal cognition, reveals a rich research program with many implications for cognitive science, evolutionary biology, regenerative medicine, and artificial intelligence.

Epistemological Aspects of the Organisation of Human Activity in the Transition from Disparate Social Techniques to Societal Technologies

The expansion and deepening of human-computer interaction in modern conditions have attracted attention to human activity and required its study at a new level. The article is devoted to the examination of the problems of organising human activity based on the knowledge of its key components. Epistemological approaches to thinking and knowing as directions of the development of human activity make it possible to increase the efficiency of the organisation of human activity as a whole and raise questions that can be resolved on the way of further methodology evolution. The further transition from the methodology of research and practices to social technologies that would allow purposefully producing new knowledge, on the basis of which, in turn, it would be possible to improve the quality of the organisation of human activity, seems appropriate and natural. The authors argue that the technological approach to problem resolution is useful and fruitful not only in the sphere of engineering and technical devices but also in the field of social relations.

ENIGMA + COINSTAC: Improving Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Re-usability

The FAIR principles, as applied to clinical and neuroimaging data, reflect the goal of making research products Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The use of the Collaborative Informatics and Neuroimaging Suite Toolkit for Anonymized Computation (COINSTAC) platform in the Enhancing Neuroimaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis (ENIGMA) consortium combines the technological approach of decentralized analyses with the sociological approach of sharing data. In addition, ENIGMA + COINSTAC provides a platform to facilitate the use of machine-actionable data objects. We first present how ENIGMA and COINSTAC support the FAIR principles, and then showcase their integration with a decentralized meta-analysis of sex differences in negative symptom severity in schizophrenia, and finally present ongoing activities and plans to advance FAIR principles in ENIGMA + COINSTAC. ENIGMA and COINSTAC currently represent efforts toward improved Access, Interoperability, and Reusability. We highlight additional improvements needed in these areas, as well as future connections to other resources for expanded Findability.

UNMANNED URBAN AIR MOBILITY: TECHNOLOGIES OF THE NEAR FUTURE

The further development of urban mobility, taking into account the latest technical and technological achievements, is considered by many leading vehicle manufacturers in creating and introducing unmanned urban air mobile vehicles into the urban environment. Despite the fact that currently the development of these means of transportation of passengers and cargo is actually in the technical plane - the integral success of introducing this type of transport depends on multiple socio-technological aspects of this phenomenon, which will have various social consequences. The objective of this paper is to identify the socio-technological issues of the phenomenon of unmanned urban air mobility. The result of this paper is to make recommendations to developers of unmanned urban air mobile vehicles in order to minimize the damage from ignoring the negative socio-technological consequences of introducing this type of transport into the urban environment. The novelty of the paper lies in the fact that this type of transport was studied not from a technical and technological point of view, which is the leading one at this stage, but using a socio-technological approach. The paper clearly proves that unmanned urban air mobile vehicles are also multifaceted social objects.

Issues of musical semantics of F. Chopin in the context of the era of romanticism

The study of works of the Romanticism period and the formation of appropriate ideas about the romantic musical style is an effective way to activate the creative thinking of young professional musicians, stimulates their artistic initiative, and makes up for the shortcomings of the technological approach. Thus, the performer gets the opportunity to realize the correct reading of the musical text, resourcefully participates in the creation of his own parts and makes stylistically competent interpretations. The creation of F. Chopin had an undoubted influence on the creation of the figurative and meaningful image of the era in which the composer lived. Using some aspects of the method of semantic analysis, the authors of the article tried to consider some features of Chopin’s musical thinking and discover the relationship between the complex of expressive means used by the composer and the meanings expressed by them, thus trying to achieve a more in-depth understanding of the style of Romanticism.

Software Platform for Supercomputer Modeling of Aerothermodynamics Problems

Numerical solution of aerothermodynamics problems requires a lot of processor time, and for this reason, the numerical codes for such simulations must be efficiently parallelized. This paper presents a software platform based on a technological approach that greatly simplifies the parallelization of problems with unstructured grids. The paper formulates the principle of a unified mathematical address space of the problem for all used cluster nodes. The formalization of the presented technological approach and the implementation of its software basis in the form of data structures, exchange routines and work rules form a software platform on the basis of which parallel computational programs can be built. This approach is implemented and tested for the problem of modeling the characteristics of aircrafts, but it can be applied to other problems using unstructured grids with one-dimensional cell numbering. In this case, the physical and mathematical specifics of the problem are not important. Parallelization of the code with the new approach is carried out with minimal effort, without changing the main parts of the program. As a result, a single computational code can be created for all regimes — sequential, multi-threaded, and cluster. The performance results obtained with the new code confirm the good scalability of the parallelization method.