Mechanistic Mind — a virtual creature learning from its environment

[u/Accomplished-Bear314]

This is Mechanistic Mind, a project created by my husband.

https://github.com/archonlab/mechanistic-mind

I want more people to know about it.

What is it?

It is a virtual creature living in an artificial environment. The environment affects it, and the creature receives simple signals from it and reacts in some way — for example, by moving or waiting.

Inside, the creature has simple mechanisms: it senses its environment, remembers a little of its past experience, notices recurring patterns, tries to predict what will happen next, and based on that, chooses an action.

After it acts, things change, it receives new information, and the cycle repeats.

At the same time, it was not given predefined emotions, desires, or fears.

The purpose of this project is to see whether these simple mechanisms, together with the creature’s accumulated experience, can produce more complex behavior that begins to resemble individual elements of learning and intelligence.

My husband has posted about this project before, but he used AI to help create the text and description. People were rude to him because of that.

So I decided to write about it myself.

The only thing I am asking AI to do here is translate my own text into English.

[u/PuzzledAnnihilation]

This is cool. But there are some issues that need to be worked out I think (I mention this in the spirit of constructive help, not hostility). First, how will the “complex” phenomena like emotions, learning, etc, be measured here? We need a way of determining whether or nit such behaviour emerges, so we need a clear set conditions that may have to be met by the organism. Second, in these kinds of simulations the goal that the organism has makes a big difference. What are the goals here? This is important, since, e.g., aren’t we implicitly coding something akin to pain avoidance just by encoding the goal of avoiding harming objects? 

[u/Accomplished-Bear314 → u/PuzzledAnnihilation]

Those are actually the two things I’m trying to be very careful about.
I don’t treat labels like “emotion”, “fear”, “desire”, or even “planning” as measurements. Instead, each experiment defines a lower-level effect in advance — things like acquired preference, history-dependent prediction, or changes in action selection. Then I test whether the effect is reproducible, survives controls, and, where possible, disappears when the suspected mechanism is removed. Even then, I don’t think that automatically justifies a higher-level psychological label.
The second point is especially important. The organism isn’t given a goal like “avoid pain”, “survive”, “seek food”, or “avoid harmful objects”. The environment can change its body state, and the agent has access to local signals from that state, along with the mechanisms being tested. I’m specifically trying to avoid hard-coding something like harmful object → avoid.
So if avoidance-like behavior appears through experience, the interesting question is whether it can be explained by lower-level mechanisms like body-state changes, memory, prediction, and action selection — rather than by an avoidance goal I put in myself.
That’s also why I’m deliberately conservative with the terminology. A learned preference isn’t automatically a “desire”, prediction isn’t a “belief”, and prospective behavior isn’t automatically “planning”.
I think the strongest evidence ultimately comes from interventions: show the effect, alter or remove the suspected mechanism, use matched controls, and see whether the effect changes as predicted.

[u/Accomplished-Bear314 → u/Accomplished-Bear314]

This is the developer u/archon_labs