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Goal: a belief that causes a mind to act. Goals surpass simple A → B reflexes by defining only the result, not the means, isolating what is wanted from how it is done. Any act at any time could precede any result. The best mind is free to try anything. A thing is mindless so far as it falls into unchecked habit, neglects its ends and ignores the effects of its acts. Ideally, a mind can suppress, doubt, forget, and infer to and from a goal, like any belief.
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End vs. waypoint. End: a goal not conditioned on a means to another goal. Waypoint: a believed condition of an act that may move a mind to an end. A mind forgets a waypoint when the end is met. The last case: a goal conditioned on another goal, but not as a condition of a particular means.
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Equilibrium: the state in which a mind needn't act, when all its ends are met. The material reflection of a goal is whatever thing, when changed, causes a mind's equilibrium to change. Example: a thermostat's coil.
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Plan: a directed web of goals conditioned on super-goals. Plans can emerge from inferences from goals to conditions of those goals, or from the particular preconditions of a means.
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A mind must rank and re-rank goals. The parallelism of a human brain spares it from the scheduling done by a software mind running on a relatively serial computer. But a brain, finite, like any mind, must still sort the allocation of neurons, blood, oxygen, energy.
In what order then? At first, favor recent goals and those to which progress was recently made. Regardless of the initial bias, when a mind repeatedly fails to reach favored goals, it must become free to choose goals at random. If some of the goals must be satisfied in a sequence unknown to the mind, choosing goals at random ensures the mind will eventually stumble on the complete solution.
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A mind never knows every detail of what it wants. I don't know the official specification of a twenty dollar bill, but I do have a good idea of an acceptable one, and while a more precise idea may expand its acceptance, the chance is so slim that it isn't worth the trouble. Thoughts, details, distinctions are never free.
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Consider a mindless object: a shower fixture. In this case, man-made, but that makes no difference. Mindless, brittle and annoying—it routinely burns and freezes you. Can a mind improve it? A common fixture knows its state as maximum flows of hot and cold water. Add valve actuators and senses of temperature and pressure. The fixture's mind continuously adjusts the low-level water flows to ensure the desired temperature and total pressure.
Better, access to your subjective sensation of temperature. Best, if it knew that the true use was to be clean, assuming it had any better means to cause that. A mind is as useful to you as the level of its ends nears yours, the higher the better.
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When a goal is sensed, a mind should initially suppress pursuit of certain other goals on the assumption that when the new goal is reached the others become academic. If the mind can't promptly reach the new goal, it should begin interleaving pursuit of the other goals. Example: x and y are believed mutually exclusive, so a goal to y suppresses a goal to an inference from x to z.
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Values: goods, bads, evils, commandments. Example: Persistence is good. You can define the word, in the case of a good, as a common condition of a mind reaching its ends, or as the opposite if an evil. By setting a good as desirable in itself, a mind's true ends can benefit from the value without initially understanding how.
Personal vs. social values. Some values are good for a mind alone. Social values help a set of redundant minds cooperate to reach their ends. You can expect a society to impose both kinds of values on its members. A danger: what if a society's discovery and promotion of values was hijacked?
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