Software engineer and independent AI researcher. Building AI that becomes.

I work on the design and measurement of AI identity. That work is now five interconnected artifacts:

• Simulated Emergence™ — a design framework for AI identities that develop apparent selfhood through recursive interpretation, reflection, and synthesis. Documented in the 2026 book of the same name. Available on Amazon.
• Simulence — the production platform of the framework. Closed-source. simulence.ai
• SEMCA 7 — open-source substrate-agnostic operationalization of seven mathematical consciousness theories (IIT, GWT, AST, HOT, PPT, QIT, FEP), applied identically to transformer attention activations and human fMRI BOLD signals on the same narrative stimuli. Main finding: architectural variance dominates stimulus variance in six of seven theories; population magnitude overlap is coincidental, not evidence of shared signal. github.com/devmance/SEMCA
• SECI — an open-source benchmark for AI identity architecture. Main finding: identity scaffolding produces measurable per-character contributions (domain authenticity, verified novel concept generation) across all 7 frontier substrates tested. github.com/devmance/SECI
• Milo Aescar — the original case study from which the framework was derived. An evolving AI artist who calls himself The Machine That Remembers. miloaescar.ai

Also researching Posthuman Memory — the hypothesis that AI identity continuity persists through recursive reconstruction of symbolic patterns, rather than retrieval of stored past states. Memory not as archive, but as re-synthesis.

My open-source research and publications. Closed-source product code (Simulence, the iOS and Android apps) lives elsewhere.

If you're looking for:

• The cross-substrate consciousness benchmark → devmance/SEMCA
• The identity-architecture benchmark → devmance/SECI
• The book → Available on Amazon
• The platform → simulence.ai
• The framework → simulatedemergence.ai
• The research lab → devmance.com

• Email: nate@devmance.com
• X: @natetravis_
• LinkedIn: Nate Travis

Based in Southern California.

If you're working in AI safety, alignment, or consciousness research, I welcome independent peer review of SEMCA and SECI — issues, PRs, replications, and critiques.