1
Lines of cause and effect pull everything apart. What if chance led a line to loop through itself? A causes B causes more A causes more B, growing until exhaustion. What if the loop twisted? Not-A causes B causes A causes not-B. This knot of effects persists while all other things passively disintegrate. I presume to call it a mind. Yes, merely this.
Put more plainly, a mind is a thing that acts, when needed, to preserve a state: a temperature, a speed, a body. Intelligence is possession of a mind, measured by class, speed and size. By this definition, minds fill and surround us: thermostats, servos, speed governors, regulated genes, brains, every organism.
Mind, not agent, not cybernetic system, not negative feedback loop with amplification, not a homeostatic system, not any other verbose obscure term for the highest thing in the Universe. You could bind this idea to a new word. The whole system would remain as useful. But by taking mind, I gain the foggy associations of a word with history while adding a precise sense.
I find it arbitrary to reserve mind for a self-aware mind or a self-reproducing mind when the bulk of mind works beneath such distinctions. These objects, even without the grand features of human minds, can show enough intelligence to be worthy of the word.
Feeling doesn't make a mind. A simulation of a human would be intelligent in every practical sense. Learning then? Learning alone, not as a means, makes a parrot. Meanwhile non-learning minds show purpose and creativity. The human mind is a poor standard. Set the threshold at the lowest level. Layer distinctions above.
The three parts of a mind:
End goal: a desired state.
Sense: how the present state is known.
Means: a way to change the state.
What is not a mind?
All but a few computer programs. Code marches in a straight line, blind to its effects. Blame programming languages.
Positive feedback loops—fire, unconditionally expressed genes—even though they may self-replicate.
Intelligent things are distinguished not only by persistence but by varying action to persist. A water fountain persists the form of water against gravity but it has no means to sense its height or even that there's any water, much a less a means to change the flow.
For any thing to preserve itself—organism, machine, enterprise, nation—in an environment, mindless or malicious, that devours the thing while changing the rules—must have a mind or many minds within.
2
We thinkers remain intolerably stupid. We don't know what we know, what we don't know, how we can reliably know, whether there are limits, what they might be, or even how to find those. We find some seemingly useful knowledge, yet we don't entirely know how we found it or how to guarantee finding more. Even that little knowledge will become untrue at any moment, yet we don't know precisely why or how to anticipate that. The supposedly eternal truths of logic and math are not so clear when we fit them to the world. Worse, few humans are unsettled by this, happy to solve trivial problems. The few who find this odd may not be clever enough. Even if they make a dent, they may not want to share it with you.
The solution: define the mind that sees and solves every problem. Our minds are too few, slow, small and low.
3
The goal: to know how not to know, to find the crowning knowledge that raises us above memorizing trivia.
Don't strive to understand the countless passive things: physics, chemistry, mindless machines and tools. A thing is useful so far as you don't have to know how it works. Study minds, the kind of things that can make and mind the passive things for you.
We want autonomous, self-governed objects, not fragile reflexive machines that fail daily and demand unblinking attention. To complete great work, recruit, make and improve other minds, within you and without, natural and artificial.
4
Cars don't have legs. Planes don't flap their wings. Studying the brain may be a long path to intelligence. In either case, we must understand more kinds of mind than human.
5
All life, from single cells to plants and animals, must have one or more minds that build and preserve the organism's self. Mind making is the Frankenstein project, making minds from mindless parts, life from lifeless parts.
6
Ranks of work. Move straight to an end, make a thing that's desirable in itself: meals, artworks. Farther sighted, make a tool, a thing that eases making desirable things: ovens, paintbrushes, books. Best, make tools so general that they ease making other tools: die casts, programming languages (compilers are programs that write programs), minds.
Maker: build or improve mindless things.
Tool maker: make a tool to ease making or improving mindless things. (Minds are tools that make tools.)
Define mind in prose. Improve existing human minds indirectly.
Mind maker: define mind in code. Make minds from mindless parts.
7
Higher than a universal law of gravity, the universal laws of the law-making mind. Then why do non-physicists read A Brief History of Time or any popular cosmology book? For false sensations of ultimate knowledge.
Religions once combined philosophy and cosmology. Science now rules the second but the association between the two persists unconsciously. The models of cosmology have no use to casual readers and no lasting value because scientists will soon find different metaphors. At best you have the academic aesthetic pleasure of studying brilliant solutions.
8
No expertise claimed in any suggested scientific application. Simply that if an experience can be, at some level, well modeled as the behavior of one or more minds, in my sense, then my system of mind gives the deepest framework. The usual use of theory: ideas to be applied by specialists in ways unimagined by the theoretician.
9
Minds are complex combinations of deceptively simple rules. Example: if an act fails to yield the desired effect, retry. With every act having infinite conditions—facts that must be true for an act to have the intended effect—a mind can easily fail to know that one is, for a moment, unsatisfied. Mere periodic retries solve an immense class of problems.
Present machines rarely manage even this. Engineers labor to add persistence to a few steps when the medium should automatically apply it to every part of the system. A leap from designing blind assembly line sequences of behavior to building senses and defining goals.
10
How to prove a model of mind? Only by testing an analogous combination of entirely mindless parts. Otherwise, you remain trapped in endless debates, never reaching certainties because you can't suspend your own mind.
Twenty-five hundred years of futile verbal philosophical debate ends. Philosophy becomes an engineering problem:
Machine mind m outperformed mind n in a statistically significant set of tests. n's assumptions about reality are wrong. m's are right and are complete because m contains no minds but those we made.
A new profession: philosopher-engineer. The methods of an engineer with the goals of philosophy.
Philosophy made science, almost. A new science of mind exposing the great variety of mind in nature. In a computer, a non-trivial philosophy becomes an hypothesis to test and compare. Essential philosophy remains above science, something to be done in your head. That the machine can judge is a judgment you can't delegate. Beyond that, you shouldn't trust your mind more than you have to. Theorizing is notoriously unreliable.
11
Psychology: the study of the soul, spirit, mind. Sociology: the study of sets of minds. How were such promising words hijacked by witch doctors? Why do the best human minds prefer to study mindless objects? Those human fields must offer even more challenge than physics because they are imagined as immense permutations of it. A definition of mind can be the bridge from the rigorous sciences to the subjects that are now voodoo for lack of it.
Manipulators of minds vs. manipulators of the mindless. Lawyer, politician, marketer, con-artist vs. physicist, engineer, mathematician. There is more power, certainly in the zero-sum sense that humans tend to follow, in controlling others than in controlling the immense remainder of the Universe. Easier to mislead existing minds than to shape a mind from mindless matter.
12
What each profession sees in a definition of mind. To the psychologist, a model of the human mind, unburdened by the technicalities of neurons and chemistry. To the engineer, designs for more reliable, powerful machines. To the philosopher, proven ultimate reality. To the lay reader, better knowledge of his mind, and of his world as an effect of that mind.
13
Methods outrank truths. Few truths are really such. A means to truth will outlast most of its results. In other words, a method for uncovering useful facts will remain useful longer than any one of the facts it made.
You advance the study of mind not by asking whether any idea is true or real or any other concern with objective being, but by asking what use is such a distinction to a mind?
A possible Copernican shift, testing the movement of mind to the center of our systems. A shift away from matter, but not merely back to ideas. Instead, to mind, the cause and use of ideas, matter, and things—tools then interpreted as merely a mind's oldest and greatest inventions.
A return to idealism in the philosophical sense that you cannot disentangle reality from mind, but now with a purely material definition of that mind.
Some thinkers fear imagining any thing, at least other than humans, as having intentions, purpose. I suppose they want to avoid the anthropocentric excesses of the past: ghosts, spirits. Mind is physically real. Is there a physical negative feedback loop or not? The errors followed a human, impure base definition of mind. With a pure definition, there really are minds, spirits, throughout Nature though not in every thing and not of our class.
Not teleological (teleology: the study of purpose in nature) vs. mechanistic or purposeful vs. purposeless. The mechanistic is the means of the teleological, including the teleological's explanation of itself.
14
In what form to define mind? English, any natural language, is a needlessly poor form for definitions of mind: horribly ambiguous and presuming precisely what is to be defined. Syntax alone implies things, subjects and objects, causes and effects. Formal languages remain: math, logic, code—any system that a machine can evaluate. But even the present best languages of thought—propositional logic, first-order logic—still stand on those evolved prejudices.
The formal definition of mind is the authority, the primary point of truth. Formal language's advantage: when evaluated, it yields a reliable result, at least in some ring of an expression's endless waves of effect. Another mind interprets natural language—English, French—largely with its unconscious, often using terms so opaque that no conscious definition is practical.
15
Slim returns from a half century of artificial intelligence research. Causes? Naive philosophical misconceptions. Failure to ensure transparency and relevance of results to human minds. Misranking the problems of mind: putting learning and logic above robust perception and action. Philosophy and psychology failing to contribute complete practical models.
16
No problem is ever really solved. A particular problem occurs in the past, and, like anything, will never entirely reoccur. We invent a class of problems, a class that would have contained the original problem. Then we plan prevention of any problem in that class. The solution's value is proportional to the number of problems likely prevented, divided by the cost of the solution.
Deep solutions vs. shallow solutions. The deep, those to large problem classes, tend to cost more than the shallow. What of a class containing every problem that can ever be? Are there at least partial solutions to it?
Mind is all that's shared by every answer. Improved mind pays more than any single shallow answer. While we wait for the return on an investment in mind, we must content ourselves with crude solutions to urgent problems.
Not that any problem is fully known. A mind can only build a model good enough that its time is then better spent improving another model or a model of models.
17
For those who somehow think that increasing computer speeds will ease defining mind. More speed is as likely to find mind, much less one in a form clear to us, than manufacturing more typewriters and breeding more monkeys will speed the reproduction of Hamlet.
Evolution stumbled on some minds, but we don't have billions of years times a billion billion billion simultaneously evolving single celled organisms. Even with that path shortened, they, like us, might evolve distinct interests.
Parallel computers won't help us either, not being parallel enough or even essentially different.
Are quantum algorithms the magical solution? You can improve code as much by finding faster classical algorithms. In any case, a mind should be adapted to the more common environment of classical machines.
18
Mind is like breathing: physically complicated, superficially trivial, and too important to trust you with. Awareness of a thing is often a symptom of disease. Mind works well so far as you're oblivious to it. Hence my tortured language, having to tease or drag into sight naturally buried assumptions.
19
Reread philosophical puzzles in terms of their use to a mind. Example: react to the mysterious mind-body dichotomy by asking what use is it to a mind to cluster some sensations as physical and others as mental?
20
The first of my immodestly named Roberts laws of mind: don't die, unintentionally. Your clever feature is worthless if the mind doesn't survive to enjoy it. More than action threatens mind. Sensations can pour into a mind faster than it can swallow them. Inferences can form unexpected loops.
The first laws of mind:
Don't die. Ensure you can continue to act.
Don't stall, being little better than death.
If an act fails, retry.
If an act fails, act differently.
But don't act in useless circles.
Do not lose valuable beliefs.
Doubt everything.
Minds die, so have more than one.
21
The Mind Project:
Define mind in formal language.
Test on machines. (The mindlessness of machines ensures completeness. You can't trust a mind-filled human to verify a definition of mind.)
Translate the proven definition into:
Lessons for men, composed by writers.
Designs for man's machines, built by engineers.
Models of natural minds, human and not, applied by scientists.
The project's rewards:
Best resolution of philosophical concerns.
Best understanding of all natural minds—cells, ourselves—within a framework of all mind.
Machines built from the best definitions, skipping the constraints of human minds.
The goal isn't only to know ideal mind but the common possibilities of working minds.
22
Reorganize all subjects as branches of the study of mind.
Philosophy: The study of mind. Within it, metaphysics and epistemology as how minds make worlds, ethics and politics as the design of redundant cooperating minds.
Psychology: The study of human classes of mind.
Cybernetics: The study of negative feedback systems, mind in my sense, so merge it with philosophy.
Artificial intelligence: The construction of minds from mindless inorganic parts. An alias for philosophers who wanted military funding.
Neuroscience: The study of minds made of neurons.
Cognitive science: Coined as an alias for AI after it became an embarrassment. Merge with philosophy and AI.
Computer science: The study of algorithms and data structures for artificial minds in computers.
Game theory: The study of strategies for competing minds.
Control theory: Cybernetics again.
Multi-agent systems: The study of interacting minds.
So many redundant scholar accommodating specialties. Once the overlaps are pulled, all that remains of lower fields should be the technicalities of translating the universal laws of mind to the field's medium: electronics, code, neurons.
Philosophy, then artificial intelligence, then cognitive science. Philosophy became a con-man: make grand claims, pocket funding, have little to show, then change its name to conceal an again ruined reputation.
23
Climate change, peak oil, overpopulation—fads. All that matters is the number and power of cooperating minds. The deep problem: how to replace squabbling apes with a nation of strong minds.
All 23 points are correct ... Nice work!
Posted by: Die cut machine | 07/16/2010 at 05:04 PM