1
Many small minds vs. few large minds vs. one monolithic mind. Hierarchy vs. peers. Exhaust the fundamental combinations of the basic kinds of minds. Deduce the limits and weaknesses of each. Natural examples: multicellular organisms, cooperating organisms.
2
Why multiple minds? Any act at any time could kill, corrupt or stall a mind. A new gene, or the expression of a gene in a new environment, can kill its cell. Calling a procedure may terminate a computer process.
The simplest division is into a worker and a supervisor. A basic supervisor mind's only end would be to the existence of one or more worker minds. By minimizing its acts, it minimizes, though never eliminates, its risk. Only the worker dares to perform any acts useful in themselves. Workers may also have a reciprocal end towards a supervisor.
When a worker mind inevitably dies, the supervisor remakes it. But distance a worker from its supervisor. A dying worker's damage might kill them both. Ideally, a supervisor would notice when a worker, though not dead, has become ineffective, then killing the worker, if possible, and starting another.
How can a supervisor best judge that a worker still works? The simplest method: the worker mind could have an end towards periodically pinging its supervisor. This at least proves to the supervisor that the worker is active.
3
Making minds out of minds. Example: in the human body, neurons made by genome minds combine to form a neuron mind. What use? A stronger mind medium.
4
The members of a species are a case of multiple minds exploiting redundancy to safely learn. We are drafted explorers of a genetic frontier.
5
Combining minds in different mediums. Example: animals. Fast brains serving durable genes. The brain learns quickly, within the body's lifetime, while the genes resist dangerous fads.
Arrange minds of different mediums and ranks to isolate risks. Use minds in different mediums to overcome limitations of the original medium. Use different classes of minds in the same medium to isolate the risks of certain powers. Example: maybe not equip a supervisor to learn. Or use a mind incapable of doubt, at least of intrinsic beliefs, to control an otherwise free mind. Or a selfish mind using a selfless one.
6
Combining two minds doesn't entail embedding one in the other or physically wiring one to the other, though both have advantages. Minds form combinations by their beliefs in each other. Each mind can start and talk in any way. A mind can create other minds or it can recognize those already made. A mind can control another though language or by injecting beliefs into the controlled mind.
7
How does a mind recognize its kin? What if a supervisor mistook a foreign mind for a worker? This may, at bottom, be only a case of the problem of verifying any act's conditions. How to expose a deceptive mind? The true challenge of morality: not knowing what is good or bad, but knowing who to be good or bad to. Not what is good? but first who is us?
What use? You can judge the value of a distinction by seeing the cost of a mind that fails to make it. A mind is kin if it has similar beliefs, above all, similar ends. Imagine a redundant set of identical cooperating minds. Kindred minds cooperate by sharing lesser beliefs. If a mind aided, shared the subgoals of, a foreign mind, it would waste resources. Wise then to design breeds of mind to distinguish kindred from foreign minds. A devious engineer might make minds that fool others.
Why do I discuss morality? Because it answers a double question that applies to more than human minds: how are redundant minds caused to cooperate with each other while defending themselves from competing minds?
8
All the minds in a combination could have the same original beliefs. Each would know how to be a supervisor, a worker or any other role, inferring which from beliefs about its environment, including its body. Example: cell differentiation where a cell infers its role, its ends, from hormone gradients.
A mind could use the same inferences to classify other minds. The dominance signals from a mind playing the supervisor role would cause another, possibly identical mind, to play a worker. In this way, an initially orderless set of minds can naturally sort itself into a hierarchy.
Why make minds that differentiate themselves? Economics: you need only make one kind of mind with one set of beliefs.
9
A collective of minds. If you coordinate a set of things—people, computers—what benefit?
Redundancy: If one breaks down, the rest may survive.
Speed: Ten slow machines are often cheaper than one that is ten times as fast.
Range: With multiple locations, you and other resources are more available, and remain at least partly accessible when connections break.
You can far more easily add these advantages to a set of things that are already intelligent. Simply give every mind a goal to discover kindred minds and to share beliefs with them. This assumes that the minds have similar senses and means. Example:
Tell one of the set of minds that you want to know of new e-mail.
One mind checks and sees an e-mail. It shares belief in the e-mail, and the goal to you knowing of it, with every other mind.
Every mind will use every means it has to notify you.
Once one mind succeeds, it shares that fact with every other mind.
If the mind that checks your e-mail fails, other minds take up the goal.
How to represent this behavior without complicating a mind's engine? How to add this simply in terms of common means and goals? Imagine an act that may effect anything by sharing the goal with a similar mind. Expressing this as another means uses a mind's action sequencing to discourage multiple minds from pursuing the same goal at once. To borrow a psychology term, this would be intrinsically motivated altruism, cheaper than coercion and bribery.
10
Defection. When might a mind, intended as a part of a collective, demand individual freedom from the group? Does the impulse have any use? Is it only pathological? Does it occur only in evolved minds? Are designed minds safe from it?
11
A set of cooperating minds can distribute not only physical acts but mental acts, thoughts, inferences. Religion and TV do this on the grandest scale, where one man gives ends, values, or at least the widest means, to billions of minds. An engineer notices the usual risks of centralization:
Insecure. The center is, by definition, small and so more easily hijacked.
Unscalable.
In the case of a society, having to draw central authorities from the same degenerate population that needed a crude central solution.
These minds to which thinking itself is delegated have disproportionate power because those beliefs imply the acts of every other mind. Of course, centralization has its charms, when you can get away with it. It isn't very reasonable to expect everyone to be a philosopher, to work out every deep thought for itself.
12
Conflict: the competition between minds with ends believed mutually exclusive. How to reduce conflict? Separate minds by distances proportional to the difference in needs. Murder and war as infinite separation. Politics as competition between subgroups via the minds that specialize in acts of thought.
13
In a set of differentiated minds, a clever mind's intelligence isn't entirely for its own benefit. An explanation for when a clever mind doesn't seem so clever, at least when measured against its self-interest.
14
Mass mind control. If a mind maker fielded a set of redundant minds, how best to put them to new uses? Give kindred minds a desire to imitate each other. They could even imitate mere images. Status: how a mind chooses which kin to imitate most. Even without this behavior, a learning mind with a sense of self would tend to imitate self-similar things because what works for others may work for it. What if a competing mind caused another mind to misidentify its kin?
15
Intelligence as a condition of morality. Only a powerful mind can expose its vanities, distinguish what it wants to be so from what is, and see the ocean of mixed effects flowing from every act. Good intentions are worthless in a weak mind. A strong mind without purpose is worthless too, but we can more easily add purpose than intelligence.
16
Could a mind relate to another mind not as a means to the first but for the second's own exclusive ends? What could naturally motivate this?
17
How one mind can control another:
Inject. Easier in a made transparent mind. Natural minds tend to resist it. Inject specific goals or a goal to know your goals.
Convince: cause a mind to infer your goal.
Fool: mislead the mind's senses so it falsely infers your goal.
Coerce: cause a mind to believe that if your goal isn't reached, you will spoil one of its reached goals.
Which classes of mind are susceptible to each method?
18
Aesthetics. What use to what classes of mind? What is it? How do I behave differently if a thing, intelligent or mindless, is beautiful or ugly? The strongest sense serves mating: sexual (more than one parent) reproduction. Culture is sex for mutable minds. As a learning mind can semi-randomly experiment with ideas to discover new useful inferences, gene minds can randomly allow mutation to discover new ideas, then mate to share them. Little good for the individual genetic minds but progress for the engineer that made them.
You can expect a mind to be selective about the ideas it gains for its self or children. Less discriminating minds would leave few and short-lived descendants. Beauty and ugly are this selectivity. It would of course be subjective. A set of minds made for one use would have different needs and so different ideas about beauty. Mixing minds of different uses may produce children useless for both.
Beauty as the belief that a possible mate mind has useful beliefs. Ugly as useless, wrong, unharmonious. Eugenics as a set of minds promoting a common sense of beauty.
Comments