Computational animal welfare: Towards cognitive architecture models of animal sentience, emotion and wellbeing

To understand animal wellbeing, we need to consider subjective phenomena and sentience. This is challenging, since these properties are private and cannot be observed directly. Certain motivations, emotions and related internal states can be inferred in animals through experiments that involve choice, learning, generalization and decision-making. Yet, even though there is significant progress in elucidating the neurobiology of human consciousness, animal consciousness is still a mystery. We propose that computational animal welfare science emerges at the intersection of animal behaviour, welfare and computational cognition. By using ideas from cognitive science, we develop a functional and generic definition of subjective phenomena as any process or state of the organism that exists from the first-person perspective and cannot be isolated from the animal subject. We then outline a general cognitive architecture to model simple forms of subjective processes and sentience. This includes evolutionary adaptation which contains top-down attention modulation, predictive processing and subjective simulation by re-entrant (recursive) computations. Thereafter, we show how this approach uses major characteristics of the subjective experience: elementary self-awareness, global workspace and qualia with unity and continuity. This provides a formal framework for process-based modelling of animal needs, subjective states, sentience and wellbeing.publishedVersio

Conceptual Relation Between Quality of Life and Environmentally Friendly Food

One of the most important indicators of the quality of life is environmentally friendly nutrition implying the use and rational combination of eco-friendly raw materials contained in recipes of new generation products, thus guaranteeing full supply of food and biologically active agents to all vital systems of an organism. The development of the society fosters the increasing interdependence and interconditionality of processes within the “nature-person-society” system. The current environmental situation brought the problem of environmental culture and its role in the optimization of socionatural interaction to the foreground. The paper presents the materials of theoretical justification of conceptual relations between the quality of life and eco-friendly nutrition; it describes pilot studies of safety indicators, polysaccharide composition of aromatic plants for their use in the production of functional food to enrich the composition with protective components. It is established that the studied aromatic plants (AP) growing in environmentally friendly territories of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania are characterized by low weight ratio of toxic substances (below admissible hygienic standards), high content of dietary fibers (DF). The sorption capacity of AP powders in relation to lead is studied. All studied powders of AP modification products are characterized by high sorption capacity. The technologies of flour food with addition of AP powders are developed. It is revealed that in comparison with control samples certain flour food products almost twice reduce the lead content in the blood of laboratory infant rats

Super fast plasma streams as drivers of transient and anomalous magnetospheric dynamics

Abstract. We present multi spacecraft measurements in the magnetosheath (MSH) and in the solar wind (SW) by Interball, Cluster and Polar, demonstrating that coherent structures with magnetosonic Mach number up to 3 – Supermagnetosonic Plasma Streams (SPS) – generate transient and anomalous boundary dynamics, which may cause substantial displacements of the magnetospheric boundaries and the riddling of peripheral boundary layers. In this regard, for the first time, we describe a direct plasma penetration into the flank boundary layers, which is a candidate for being the dominant transport mechanism for disturbed MSH periods. Typically SPS's have a ram pressure exceeding by several times that of the SW and lead to long-range correlations between processes at the bow shock (BS) and at the magnetopause (MP) on one side and between MSH and MP boundary layers on the other side. We demonstrate that SPS's can be observed both near the BS and near the MP and argue that they are often triggered by hot flow anomalies (HFA), which represent local obstacles to the SW flow and can induce the SPS generation as a means for achieving a local flow balance. Finally, we also discuss other causes of SPS's, both SW-induced and intrinsic to the MSH. SPS's appear to be universal means for establishing a new equilibrium between flowing plasmas and may also prove to be important for astrophysical and fusion applications