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A Virtual Center of The Mensch Foundation
The Science, Engineering and Business of Embedded Intelligence Technology
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Introduction
The Center for Embedded Intelligent Systems Studies (CEISS) is a virtual center supported by The Bill and Dianne Mensch Foundation, Inc. Its subject is the Science, Engineering and Business of Embedded Intelligence Technology (EIT), and its working question is a practical one: how does The Theory of Embedded Intelligence (TEI) apply to whatever it is you are actually studying?
For most of its life, this page answered that question with a list — twenty areas of inquiry that could benefit from an embedded intelligent systems (EIS) perspective. The list is still here, further down, and it still stands. But a list is a claim rather than an instrument. A student who arrived here with a thesis topic already in hand found twenty categories and no procedure. She had been told that her subject would benefit from an embedded-intelligence perspective. She had not been told what to do on Monday morning.
That gap is now closed.
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Start Here
The Portable Method — an essay in the TEI in the Wild series — sets out six steps for applying the Theory of Embedded Intelligence to any topic, together with a test for telling the difference between a genuine result and a rearrangement of words. It includes three worked demonstrations, one of which is deliberately allowed to fail before it succeeds. A one-page companion card carries the six steps and the test on a single sheet you can print, post above a desk, or hand out in a seminar. |
The Method in Brief
The six steps are given here in summary. The essay explains each one, shows it working, and states the condition under which the whole method should be withdrawn.
| 1 | Name the system Draw a boundary in one sentence. Not the field — the system. Not ecology but this estuary; not constitutional law but this court deciding this class of case. |
| 2 | State the standard rendering What the discipline itself says, in its own vocabulary, well enough that a working practitioner would nod and not wince. TEI is a lens, not a shortcut. |
| 3 | Map the SPCA cycle Where does the system Sense? Process? Communicate, and to whom? Actuate — what does it actually do? And where is Memory: what is retained, in what substrate, for how long? |
| 4 | Apply the Relabeling Test Did the map tell you something you did not already know, that you can now go and check? If not, you have relabeled rather than applied. Discard it and redraw the boundary. |
| 5 | Find the seam A phase the field under-describes; a handoff assumed rather than explained; or a cycle that never closes — actuation that never returns as sensing. Seams are where the yield is. |
| 6 | Run the capture diagnostic, then actuate Is the cycle open or captured? Ask of the system you study, then of the discipline that studies it. Then close your own cycle — publish, build, teach, change a practice. |
After you finish the SPCA map, ask: did this tell me something I did not already know, that I can now go and check?
Yes — you have a result; pursue it. No — you have a translation; discard it and redraw the boundary at step one.
The test exists because a framework that fits every subject is, for exactly that reason, in danger of illuminating none of them. TEI’s First Law requires the map to expand the frontier, not to decorate it. A framework that cannot fail you cannot help you.
The six steps and the Relabeling Test on a single page — print it, post it above a desk, or hand it out in a seminar.
Working With AI
The Foundation’s custom assistants — TEI-GPT and EIT-GPT — and any capable AI you already use can carry a great deal of this work. They can supply the standard rendering quickly, generate candidate SPCA maps for you to argue with, play adversary against your own map, and search other domains for structural analogues to your seam. You can also bring TEI to your own AI directly.
One discipline matters more than all the rest. Write your own map first — badly, on paper — before you ask any machine anything. Then ask the machine to attack it. That order is the whole difference between augmentation and replacement.
Use AI to widen Sense and to stress-test Communicate. Never to substitute for Process.
A fluent answer produced in nine seconds feels like the output of understanding without anyone having undergone any. The Process phase is where a mind is formed, and it is the one step that cannot be delegated without the exercise becoming decorative.
Areas of Inquiry
What follows is a partial list of areas that could benefit from an embedded intelligent systems (EIS) perspective. It is partial by design, and the method above does not depend on it. If your subject is supply-chain logistics, or Byzantine liturgy, or the epidemiology of a single county, or the grammar of a language with four hundred remaining speakers, the six steps apply unchanged. Twenty was never the number. Twenty is an invitation.
- Quantum Physics and Quantum Mechanics
- Atomic Physics
- Abiotic Factors and Structures
- Biotic Factors and Structures
- Cellular Biological Sciences
- Life Sciences
- Organization in Biology
- Moral Sciences
- Political Sciences
- Social Sciences
- Applied Sciences
- Philosophy — and the human EIS, aka the mind
- Myth — and the human EIS, aka the mind
- Religion — and the human EIS, aka the mind
- Psychology — and the human EIS, aka the mind
- Fine Arts
- Performing Arts
- Humanities
- Physical Sciences
- Astrobiology
The TEI Canonical Knowledge Base contains a worked SPCA rendering of each of these twenty areas, for readers who would like to see a starting point before drawing their own. Treat those renderings as examples to argue with rather than answers to adopt — and run the Relabeling Test on them too.
CEISS and The Mensch Prize
CEISS is a resource for The Mensch Prize scholarship recipients. Prizes are offered at a growing number of schools, colleges, and universities; the current list is kept on The Mensch Prize Introduction page. Recipients, selection committees, teachers, professors, mentors, administrators, parents, and students are all welcome to use everything on this page, freely and without attribution. Evolutionary steps for The Mensch Prize could include presentations at National and Regional Honors Conferences.
For advisers and faculty: the most useful deployment of the method we know of is smaller than a course. It is a single seminar hour. Ask each student to name a system, map it, and then apply the Relabeling Test to a classmate’s map rather than to their own. Students are gentle with their own relabeling and usefully ruthless with everyone else’s.
Workshops, Talks, and What Comes Next
CEISS aims to create workshops that can be beneficial to all ages. The first was The Theory of Embedded Intelligence (EI) Introduction & Workshop, held on April 18, 2022 at Loews Ventana Resort in Tucson, Arizona, during The Science of Consciousness (TSC) Conference 2022. An Embedded Intelligence talk followed on April 23, 2024 at The Science of Consciousness Conference 2024. Future activities may include recorded conversations, interviews, panel discussions, and practical applications of the understanding of Embedded Intelligent Systems (EIS).
One long-standing example of studying embedded intelligent systems in nature and applying what is learned for the benefit of many is Biomimicry. Readers new to the framework may prefer to begin at Learn TEI.
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Everything on this page is offered freely. A thesis, a paper, a design, or a class that used the six steps to find its question and then never mentions embedded intelligence again is a complete success by our measure.
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