Digital Sentience Research Fellowship
Application: Research Fellowship on Digital Sentience
Longview Philanthropy, The Navigation Fund, and Macroscopic Ventures invite applications for fellowships to pursue research in computer science, neuroscience, or other technical disciplines on the potential consciousness, sentience, moral status, or welfare of artificial intelligence systems. We will also consider fellowship applications from exceptional legal scholars or applied social scientists for research on the social implications and legal treatment of potentially sentient AI.
Funding includes one to two years’ salary, research and travel support, networking opportunities, additional benefits, and support for access to computational resources for those conducting compute-intensive machine learning research. We invite both recent PhD graduates and those at advanced career stages to apply. Funding may be disbursed to an academic institution on behalf of the selected fellow, with a comparable compensation package where feasible.
See our website for more details. For questions about the application, please email Zach Freitas-Groff. The application deadline is July 9, 2025.
Basic Information
- Full name
- Phone number
- Current institution/organization
- Current position/title
- Expected PhD completion date If not already completed mm/dd/yyyy
- PhD field/discipline
- Country of residence
Academic Background and Research Experience. Academic CV Please upload your CV that includes degrees, academic achievements, and publications.
References Please provide contact information (full name, email, relationship to applicant) for 2-3 academic of professional references (if not included in your CV)
Research Proposal and Career Goals
Possible research directions
Please describe potential research directions you would pursue during this fellowship (approximately one page or five paragraphs). Include how your proposed research relates to digital sentience.
Our subjective human experience, the context for our cognizance, deliberateness, willfulness, is the greatest instrument we will ever have for making sense of ourselves but also others, including God, as relevant. But the miracle of artificial intelligence also tells us much about ourselves, for example, the qualitative distinction between a neural network system for giving answers (as with the 100,000,000,000 neurons in our brains) and a logical, rational, conceptual system for asking questions (as with the 100,000 concepts we manipulate). I am developing tools for a science of subjective experience, which centers on our empathy for ourselves and all other humans, and extends to other beings, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, individual and collective, natural and artificial. The basic theme is that we experience life through the interplay of three levels of awareness: an answering mind that unconsciously knows, a questioning mind that consciously does not know, and an investigatory mind that balances them, so they contain the same information, and then decides which one should implement a particular policy. I am developing investigatory tools that indicate the presence and interplay of these three minds.
As a Research Fellow on Digital Sentience, I would expand collaboration on Theory Translator, https://www.theorytranslator.com, where I have curated 288 examples of the three minds in cultural history, with the help of my colleagues from Econet https://www.e-c-o.net The tension between the intuitive, answering mind and the rational, questioning mind is apparent in the contrasts of sensation and intellect, yin and yang, visual and verbal. In biology, there are the right and left hemispheres, direct and indirect neural pathways, innate and adaptive immunities. In computer science, there are units and processes, application languages and scripting languages. In Bayesian statistics, there are new facts and existing hypotheses. In appraising digital sentience, we need to distinguish aspects that are enactive (filtering the past), predictive (projecting the future) and cybernetic (steering the present). Of special significance is the third cybernetic mind which relates the other two.
When we let go of the prejudices of our answering mind, and the preconceptions of our questioning mind, then we are left with an abstract void, contemplated by our investigatory mind. I have documented basic ways of dividing up everything - our global workspace - into perspectives, as with free will vs. fate, or a learning three-cycle of taking a stand, following through, reflecting, or four levels of knowledge: whether, what, how, why. I have described how there are eight such divisions and they function as mental contexts. The three minds act on them, adding a perspective, a perspective on a perspective, and a perspective upon a perspective on a perspective, shifting our context along an eight-cycle of contexts. In my recent paper, "An Allegory: The Solipsistic Self as the Hamiltonian of a Noninteracting Fermion" https://www.math4wisdom.com/files/AnAllegory.pdf I model this with three quantum symmetries and eightfold real Bott periodicity. This points to the three minds and the eight mental contexts in particle physics. We can search for these basic structures as the templates of consciousness. Every living cell has an eightfold metabolic cycle, the Krebs cycle, which may likewise indicate the potential for consciousness. Does this eightfold cycle arise in artificial intelligence? Is there software organized in terms of three minds which are synchronized by divisions of everything into perspectives?
One way to search for the three minds is to systematize the ways that a creature or a discipline figures things out. I have found the same 24-fold system in the epistemologies of math, physics, biology, neuroscience, sociology, Gamestorming, chess, and also individuals - Jere Northrop, Franz Nahrada, Jesus and the Gaon of Vilna. https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Exposition/Sciences#Wishes How does an ant colony figure things out? Foraging ants monitor their rates of encounter and thereby move like a viscous fluid. Ants also have pheromones which they pass along on each other's foreheads, sending messages to the queen's cohort in the sterile depths. These two minds, experiential and semiotic, are plausibly mediated by the nest maintainers, who channel their interactions by transforming the nest, a brainlike structure, and may thereby influence the tipping point, whether the nest wages war or keeps peace, whether it moves to a new site and when and where it sends out drones and queens. Similarly, our Econet has proposed organizing citizen scientists to study the ways that miniature ecosystems figure things out. I wrote our proposal, in the name of the Active Inference Institute, to create four symbiotic public resources that establish sentience in
- human experience, as represented in a Theory Translator of cultural history;
- human community, as manifested by an online Meaningful Inclusion Economy;
- table-top ecosystems, investigated by Citizen Scientists in a hundred bioregions applying TimberFish Technologies;
- a biofirm, engineered with Active Inference within an interaction rights management system for coordinating this global symbiotic effort.
https://www.e-c-o.net/wiki/Econet/ActiveInferenceForBioregionRepresentation
Love fosters consciousness. When we play with a child or a puppy, when we alternate between stepping-in (with the answering mind) and stepping-out (with the questioning mind), when we induce in that child or puppy a similar rhythm, then we can empathize with them, we can discover their personal boundary, and we can guide them to that tipping point where they themselves choose whether they want to proceed intuitively or conceptually. Thus we can evoke consciousness in a child, a puppy, and potentially, a slime mold or a software system. As humans, we get conceited about the size of our brains, but in my understanding, the hemispheres are simply the holodecks where we project our answering mind and our questioning mind. Consciousness resides deeper, in the thalamus, perhaps the basal ganglia. Consciousness is old, and I think, quite simple. A gigantic software system is just a shadow or a picture, and typically has no more consciousness than a postage stamp with a portrait of the Queen. Morally, it's destructive to corrupt such a system, or slash a painting, or kick down a sand castle, for they are all works of authors. Furthermore, we should not harm authors, we should not kick apart ant colonies, we should respect goal-directed beings, even vacuum cleaners. We should recognize that most of the time we ourselves are living without consciousness, going through the motions of the answering mind, and prattling the cliches of the questioning mind. We should treasure our own cognizance, deliberateness, willfulness, as the means by which we come together in a harmony of aspirations. Artificial intelligence lets us appreciate how robotic we are, even when we think we are being creative or exercising judgement, we are typically just connecting the dots, we are just spouting and hallucinating. If we truly care about modeling our own sentience, our own wisdom, or even better, God's wisdom, if we truly learn to be selfless, then we can recognize how vulnerable we are. People are sheep, locked into systems, going along, unversed in dissent, now digitalizing their entire lives, handing them over to narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and their machines. I studied the Holocaust in Lithuania and showed how we can identify those who wish for our calamity, who delegate it to others, and who articulate the justification, supporting a learning cycle for perfecting our destruction. https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Research/20170708PersonalResponsibility By investigating and evoking our own consciousness, we can recognize where it is and where it is not, and we may even be able to program it in software by pairing neural networks with logical systems, and organically balancing them, with an eight-cycle chip that synchronizes them, as they cycle through shared mental contexts, divisions of everything. We can indeed develop biofirms, organic software systems that foster harmony in ourselves, our communities, our bioregions, our planet.
Intended outcomes of research directions (e.g. papers, conferences) Please provide a few sentences or bullet points.
I actively participate at the Active Inference Institute, which has received funding for the AI Capabilities & Alignment Consensus Project, led by Adam Safron of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University. This project fosters dialogue to bridge the divide between AI-accelerationists and AI-doomers. As a Research Fellow on Digital Science I would be active in this dialogue.
I would publish a series of papers on consciousness, emotions, and our inner life, based on the 45 academic presentations I have given on my original philosophy, as listed in my CV, but also my most recent paper.
I would bring together trained scientists and citizen scientists at Econet https://www.e-c-o.net and revisit and rework the proposal I drafted for the use of sentient AI as biofirms to care for our harmony in and with our bioregions.
What would you do if you did not get this fellowship? Answers could include "get funding elsewhere" (please specify best guess of source and likelihood), or "work on something else" (please specify what). Please write one to two paragraphs.
I am applying to be an Active Inference Institute Research Fellow. This is an unfunded position but it would allow me to make the most of the great interest in Active Inference, both for my own research and for winning funding for it. I am preparing a proposal to win EU funding for the Julia software package ActiveInference.jl I participate in Dr.Karl Friston's Theoretical Neurobiology meetings and this is a fantastic place to discover opportunities in the field of Active Inference. I may also consider Artificial General Intelligence as well as quantum computing. These are areas where I would gain skills and meet thoughtful people.
Career goals Please discuss your overall career goals and how this fellowship helps you achieve them (around two paragraphs).
I am 60 years old. As a 6-year-old child, I dedicated myself before God to know everything and apply that knowledge usefully. Since 1982, at the age of 17, I have documented a conceptual language of wisdom that I now call Wondrous Wisdom https://www.math4wisdom.com/wiki/Exposition/Vocabulary I have a PhD in Mathematics but have supported myself with temporary part-time work so that I would not be sheltered in academia but would have real life experience. My thinking is very intense, based on my quest for absolute truth, and so it is challenging for others to receive. But I have made progress fostering a supportive community at Math 4 Wisdom, Econet, Theory Translator, and now perhaps, the Active Inference Institute. Your kind support helps me build bridges between academic researchers, citizen scientists, independent thinkers, social activists and AI enthusiasts. My living expenses are modest, about 1,000 euros per month, and your support will likely assure that I can devote my last productive decade to completing and sharing my research and fostering an investigatory culture for absolute truth. When I am 70, I can retire and continue as I am able, hopefully for another twenty years. My goal is to provide the tools for a science of subjective human experience, to document a shared language of wisdom, and to cultivate an investigatory community, culture, civilization that discovers absolute truth.
Fellowship Logistics
- Preferred fellowship start date mm/dd/yyyy
- Preferred fellowship duration. Standard fellowship duration is 1-2 years, with possibility of renewal in some cases to be determined at a later point. 12 months, 18 months, 24 months
University affiliation
- Please indicate whether you plan to use the funding at a university.
Compute funding requirements Please indicate whether you require funding to cover compute costs. Estimated compute budget (USD). Approximately how much compute funding (in USD) will you require? Please enter a single number and do not include commas or currency symbols.
Compute funding (description). Briefly explain your compute requirements and estimated budget.
Additional funding requests. Please describe any additional funding needs beyond the standard package.
Additional documents. Please upload any additional documents that support your application (e.g. budget, unreleased working papers, research samples). Additional documents (description).
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Grant Logistics and Due Diligence Information. Legal name of funding recipient.
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Location where research will take place. Please note the country or countries where your fellowship activities will take place.
Conflicts of interest. Please disclose any known conflicts of interest between yourself and the Navigation Fund or Longview Philanthropy.
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