i3AI

i3AI - the Infinite Improbability Institute for Artificial Intelligence - is the umbrella for my independent research into the substrate of biological intelligence and consciousness. What began toward a PhD thesis in 1999 I revisited during a three-year sabbatical (2017-2020) and have continued since, working toward a biologically plausible neural-network framework for AGI. The neural-network engineering thread is quieter while I focus on agentic AI, but the consciousness research is active again, and the computational-neuroscience learnings continue to guide the agentic work.

The research lives in two main threads, captured as sub-projects below: the AGI experiments sandbox, and the Homeostasis Theory of consciousness. A public site (built on Sitepress/Rails) hosts the long-form manuscripts, the 2018 poster, and supporting essays.

The consciousness thread is where the recent work sits. The central manuscript has been substantially reworked into an illusionist homeostatic theory of valence — an account of why pain is bad — positioned as the "stakes layer" of experience that complements global-workspace and integrated-information theories rather than competing with them. The mechanism is credited as a synthesis of perceptual control, homeostatic reinforcement learning, and active inference; the novel contributions are the illusionist framing, a falsifiable behavioral signature, and a two-ingredient criterion for machine consciousness, with a small open-data reanalysis as a first empirical probe.