‘’COGITO in Space”: a thought experiment in exo-neurobiology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2014, media artist Daniela de Paulis first presented at ASTRON in The Netherlands the possibility of radio-transmission of brain activity as part of her project ‘’COGITO in Space”, for which laboratory-grade EEG recordings are analyzed and converted to sound in real-time, using an open-source interstellar EEG-transmission protocol designed for the project by Guillaume Dumas and Michael Sanders and integrated in the EEGsynth fieldtrip software package. The 25m dish antenna of the Dwingeloo radio telescope in The Netherlands instantly transmits this audio-stream into space while the participant’s brain activity is recorded. The antenna uses amateur radio equipment, with a SingleSideBand (SSB) 120W power transmission with a fixed dish position. By spreading transmissions over the sky chances of possible detection by an alien civilization are limited. One of the challenges of the project was the real-time conversion of 32-channel EEG into a mono 3kHz audio signal for a linear SSB modulated radio transmission, including the 3D electrode positions that would allow the reconstruction of the cortical activity and topography by a hypothetical receiver.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".