Adaptive connection to the world through self-organizing sensors and effectors

The realm of devices composed of adaptive sensing, computing, and effecting elements is surveyed, and contemporary devices are categorized accordingly. A new class of adaptive devices, those which adaptively construct their sensors and effectors, is presented. Such complement those which perform adaptive computations and could be used for adaptively constructing appropriate feature and action primitives for connectionist devices, thereby determining the real-world semantic categories within which the computational optimizations take place. Networks of such semantically adaptive elements would be capable of open-ended generation of new, orthogonal signal types, not logically reducible to preexisting types. An alternative conception of neurons as adaptive temporal elements utilizing the dynamic properties of excitable membranes is briefly outlined