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The charm of mind-making: a mind is its best co-inventor. The mind maker's end is to define the end-reaching mind. The project's end is its means. Every step speeds the next. Even a mind too weak to devise truly original means can at least apply itself to intelligently telling you of its needs and faults.
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Philosophy lost its rank but what else can we call this mind work? If this work is so important, why isn't philosophy? Philosophy finds little praise because it only negates. It frames reality, never yields a single fact, but exposes the absurd beliefs that human minds are riddled with.
Even once you value philosophy, it remains unnaturally hard to apply, to see reality without the simplifications that your mind always makes. You can only afford to correct your worst errors.
You don't need science—relativity, quantum mechanics, any kind—to notice that most things are dependent and uncertain, that reality is strange. Physics has little more to tell philosophy than any subject studied deeply. Second-rate philosophers became victims of physics envy. Not that physics isn't a paragon of thought, but imitate the method, not the content.
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Epistemology vs. metaphysics. Metaphysics: how things exist apart from our knowledge of them. Epistemology: how we know of things. How to untangle the two branches of philosophy once you realize how much a mind contributes to reality?
4
A universal measure of intelligence. How to reduce the power of any mind—thermostat, cell, robot, human, super-human—to one number? A meter or gram of intelligence. We can't systematically improve minds without an objective means of comparison. Dimensions:
Strength, robustness: the chance that a mind will break or fall into hopeless loops.
Speed: sensations, inferences or acts per second.
Size: maximum number of distinctions held in the mind itself.
Class in my taxonomy.
Power and number of means and senses.
How to measure and combine each? How to interpret some measures as forms of others? Obviously we can't reuse human intelligence tests. Most non-humans can't take them. We need tests for minds without eyes and words. Tests are biased! Yes, towards what's useful to the tester.
Speed and size are partly interchangeable. A large slow mind can fake speed by remembering and reusing past results. A fast small mind can quickly reproduce most ideas.
There's more to measure than only sequence-learning power. Not all minds even learn in that sense. Any useful practical mind holds more.
Measurement of a bare engine vs. a mind with good beliefs, senses and means. A strong mind can remake much for itself. A weak mind tends to be stuck with what it is given.
Is each mind incomparable because each acts in its own unique universe and with personal ends? Are there really general purpose minds or is there inevitably some bias? The use of a mind is to be general, to solve new problems, so we must have a method.
Measure the power of cooperating sets of minds. A thousand 100 IQ humans, if focused, can't reach the depth of one man with a 150 IQ. They couldn't even match a 130 IQ. Then subtract the costs of reducing conflict within large groups and of discouraging defection.
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General vs. specific intelligence: how well a can a mind, its engine and beliefs, apply to other problems. In the extreme case, a thermostat, the mind has no use elsewhere. Minimal intelligence connects its sense and means.
Imagine a chess player who knows none of the game's rules but has an immense invisible book with the best move for every board. If intelligence is action selection in a fixed world, then he is perfectly intelligent in chess. Maybe intelligence is better measured as quality of action divided by the size of the mind, its beliefs, in bits. Intelligence as compression. Are there such play books in our blood?
Aren't there many kinds of intelligence? Emotional intelligence? You can define your words however you like. If I can have emotional intelligence, why not tennis intelligence? Intelligence becomes a synonym for good. Is the distinction that a part of the brain is genetically devoted to recognizing emotion? So is a part for breathing.
The idea of multiple intelligences is of little real use. The unconscious could, and certainly does, contain structures devoted to certain tasks. But the value of intelligence is in its generality. We had little time to evolve car-driving intelligence.
Mind is quality not quantity. It improves by simplifying itself. Simple means more general, less to break. Multiple intelligences is second-rate engineering.
6
Why be stupid? What use are weak minds?
Fewer moving parts. Less to break.
Lower cost. Intelligence has a price: food, blood, CPU time. In some ways, intelligence is free: a far-sighted health-conscious genius eats less than a fat fool.
Content pursuing modest, easily reached ends.
Cruder to control but less able to resist.
A mind desiring novelty shouldn't see the patterns in its work when it lacks the power to solve those patterns.
Weak minds rarely see their low intelligence because they tend to have proportionally weak goals. A mind maker would tend to fit a mind to its goals, not wasting resources on excess intelligence for a mind that can reach its ends well enough.
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A brief history of mind engineering.
8000 BC - 1600 AD
Agriculture, animal husbandry and society. Only plants, animals and other men had minds capable and worthy of control. Plants are food making machines that use their genome minds to build and preserve themselves. Animal genome minds are bred for more food and for brains to train. Human minds are controlled by the same methods plus culture, religion and status.
1600 - 1700
The first recorded man-made minds: windmill governors that control the separation of millstones.
1788
Watt adds a speed governor to the steam engine. Simple man-made minds becomes widespread.
1837
Babbage designs the first computer: the Analytical Engine. Without computers, non-trivial minds are nearly impossible to design.
Imagine an alternative history where engineers, instead of making minds from nothing, intensely bred organic minds and embedded them in their machines.
But what do we care for the past forms and progress of mind? The goal is ideal mind, not how mind first occurred, or the other accidents of Nature and history.
8
An edge case: moderator vs. governor. What is the difference? Is a moderator also a mind? You can imagine a moderator as having the goal to a speed less than x. Negative, but still a goal. Some moderators don't qualify as minds. A centrifugal brake falls below the threshold because its means of sensation and action are the same. The brake pads both judge and enforce the speed limit. A governor, even when disconnected from the throttle valve, still judges the speed and can be connected to an entirely different means of control.
Everything is continuous. So every idea is a simplification. So we shouldn't be surprised that our categories fit poorly at the edges. Yet we still want well crafted words.
9
Human minds seem so mutable, seem to so lack true identity, because minds are made to cause change, including changes to themselves. What kinds of limits can be placed on a thing that can change most or any part of itself? How can a deeply self-changing thing be made predictable? Higher limits remain—speed, size, the controllers served—with different costs to change each.
10
How to make a reliable system out of unreliable parts? Is perfect reliability possible? The engineering goal isn't to make a perfect machine by eliminating unreliable parts but by building a machine that perfectly handles the unreliable, which, by degrees, is everything.
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An AI enthusiast: A self-improving man-made “seed” mind would soon raise its intelligence above our imagination. Isn't a human a self-improving seed mind? Why aren't humans super intelligent? Because our brains remain opaque to us and we have, likely for the best, only indirect means of rewiring them.
A learning machine mind would at first know even less about itself than we do. Its unconscious foundation of code would be as opaque to it as our brains are to us. Would it at least understand itself more easily? Becoming transparent by degrees. How well could we help it? And how much intelligence would it gain before we can't help it further?
Would you want the mind to change itself so easily? A desire to preserve itself, if only as a means, would discourage the mind from reckless self-experiments. The inevitable deaths would only annoy you while waiting for the mind to resurrect itself from its own backups.
Will man-made minds be better? Or are our weaknesses inevitable features of any intelligence?
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A taxonomy of error. Find intelligence by defining what it is not: dead, slow, moving in hopeless circles, believing fixed ideas, generalizing too much or too little.
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Environmental determinism: a mind is caused by its environment? Yet a human mind's environment is almost entirely an effect of the same or similar minds: house, school, library, vitamins, media. What natural environment? The point of a mind is to change its environment, to relentlessly defy it. Passive means mindless.
14
The brain values the stomach. To the stomach, the brain is a leech.
A high mind sees farther into the conditions of survival. Weak minds, being conformists to ease imitation, might vilify the higher mind's work. How can a high mind handle the weak when they tend to have numbers and cunning on their side?
End or isolate the weak minds. Easy since weak minds are often superfluous.
Status. Example: humans were trained, not convinced, to respect theoretical physicists.
Extrinsic motivation: money.
Coercion: the whip.
The most abstract work possible, seeing mind itself, is the darkest work to weak minds. Their poor imagination blinds them.
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With mind better and broadly defined, can we redeem—give useful meaning—to words that became vague superstitious nonsense?
Destiny: a hidden mind guiding another mind. What real sense might it have in my mind framework? How do we use the word? He was destined to die. Destiny must mean something more than blind cause and effect. To be destined probably means that even if you or another act to avoid the destined end, that fate will counteract. So destiny is another mind. But we don't say a student was destined to graduate because a teacher helped him. To be destiny, the other mind must have super-human power, possibly discarnate. Do such minds exist? Of what class and with what ends, senses and means? In what medium and how to find and prove them? Might a set of humans form a higher mind as neurons form a brain? Not that my mind seems to take interest in single neurons. Or is destiny run by your unconscious minds? How could we control destiny? Or at least better see and work with it.
Soul: your mind, or minds, or only their beliefs or a subset of them, discarnate and not dying with the body. How can anything lack a body? Either way, a soul seems uneconomical. I see no reason to imagine that our mind would be remotely controlled elsewhere, or duplicated at death. Complicated by the fact that we have both genetic and brain minds, with the latter meant to serve the former, but holding much of what we think ought to be in a soul.
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A future book: The Autobiography of a Machine Mind. The first book written by a non-human mind—truly a mind, not a blind story-contriving computer program. Theists have the competing claim that discarnate non-human minds wrote the books of religions.
17
A mind maker's prejudices:
Mind deserves more interest than means.
What lasts is better than what changes.
Universal outranks local. (Ghostly eternal abstractions preferred to vivid but passing facts.)
Better truth than lies.
Truth is undemocratic.
When do the mindless outdo the intelligent? The value of blind reflex: fast, simple, cheap. Mind often advances by how much work it can push below mind.
18
To what end? Let's not be so modest, not trade one problem for the next. Ignore the worthless scribbles of weak minds: regulations, surveys, newspapers. Study and expand the laws of mind. Not the laws of men but the laws of God.
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