Symbiosis
Symbiosis starts from a simple assumption: mutual understanding between different species or forms of intelligence requires a shared context.
Without such a context, there is no common framework through which signals, actions or symbols can be interpreted.
But what if that context does not exist beforehand?
What if, instead of trying to transmit a predefined language or set of meanings, communication began by building the context itself through interaction?
Building a shared context
Symbiosis explores communication as a dynamic and iterative process between two
different agents.
One is sentient: another animal species, or — in the original
interstellar scenario — an unknown technological species.
The other is a
formal machine: a non-sentient agent whose possible actions are
determined by an explicit set of rules.
The two interact through alternating actions. The sentient agent does something; the formal machine responds according to its rules and to what has already happened. Each new action therefore takes place in a context that has been slightly changed by the previous exchange.
Meaning is not necessarily transmitted at the beginning. It may emerge progressively from the history of the interaction.
The simplest image I originally used to imagine the process was a robotic arm and a monkey taking turns manipulating Lego bricks. Neither needs to be given a predefined symbolic vocabulary. Through repetition, variation, response, cooperation or disruption, patterns may begin to acquire significance because both participants share the history that produced them.
The bricks are not the language. The interaction is what makes a language possible.
The formal machine
The formal machine is deliberately an abstract concept. It is not necessarily a robot, a particular piece of software or a machine with a specific physical form. It is a non-sentient agent whose behavior can be described through well-defined rules and which can respond to the actions of another agent.
Its limits are important. The machine does not need to understand the other species, simulate a human mind or secretly contain a complete language waiting to be decoded. It needs to provide a sufficiently coherent and responsive counterpart for an interaction to develop over time.
In the context of the Human Message, such a machine could embody a minimal set of human ways of interacting with reality — manipulating the environment, using tools, creating structures and responding to previous actions — without attempting to encode a complete description of human culture.
The shared context would then arise not from a dictionary sent in advance, but from what the two participants actually do together.
The information payload
From this perspective, the information carried by Symbiosis is unusual.
The information payload of Symbiosis is not a predefined message, but a shared effort toward building a common path for communication.
Every interaction adds something to that path. A repeated action, an interruption, an unexpected response or even the refusal to continue may become information because it occurs inside an accumulating history shared by both participants.
Symbiosis can therefore be understood as a pathfinder for communication. It does not attempt to carry a complete language or a predefined body of meanings. Its purpose is to explore and establish the common ground upon which further communication might eventually be built.
The first successful outcome would not necessarily be the exchange of a complex idea. It might simply be the emergence of the first mutually recognizable pattern. And that would already be new information.
From an abstract machine to a real species
In principle, the same approach could be explored on Earth through interaction with non-human species. Here, however, the simplicity of the abstract model disappears very quickly.
Any real implementation would have to take into account the ethology, perception, sensory modalities, behavior and environment of the species involved. An unfamiliar physical object may provoke curiosity in one species and fear or avoidance in another. Shape, movement, sound, smell, scale and timing may all affect the interaction before any shared context has had a chance to emerge.
Human interference would also have to be minimized. A system intended to interact with another species should not simply train that species to respond to human-designed signals while mistaking the result for a mutually constructed context.
A machine intended for an octopus would therefore be fundamentally different from one designed to interact with a primate, a bird or a terrestrial mammal. It might need a different body, different sensors, different ways of acting and an entirely different relationship with its environment.
For this reason, the physical form of the machine is not part of Symbiosis itself. It is an implementation problem — and a complex one, requiring expertise in fields such as ethology, biology, robotics and artificial intelligence.
Symbiosis remains the more abstract idea underneath:
Do not assume a shared language; create an interaction in which a shared context has the possibility to emerge.