Minds can be made from more than neurons.
Dimensions
Any class of mind in the taxonomy can be made in any medium. These dimensions only describe the technical challenges of making those minds.
Form: How beliefs are held.
Parallelism: Are thoughts—inferences made, actions chosen, beliefs forgotten—one at a time? A sequential medium can simulate parallelism but such a simulation is not trivial.
Speed: You can miss a mind if it exceeds your patience. A mind's acts are better fast than perfect.
Size: Physically. Small as a gene or as large as a planet.
Transparency: Can we read the physical form of a mind's beliefs.
Volatility: How easily are beliefs held in the medium lost or corrupted.
Mutability: Can a mind gain beliefs in its lifetime.
Brains
Form: Web of neurons.
Size: Small.
Volatility: Low. Requires oxygen.
Parallelism: Yes, though consciousness feels sequential.
Feels: Possibly.
Transparency: Partially to present science. No backups.
Speed: Slow per neuron. Faster than genes. Why animals have brains and plants don't.
Mutable: Yes.
Fewer conditions of self-replication than machine minds.
Regulated Genes
Genes as minds. A complex genome mind in every cell? Evidence: genes found controlling negative feedback loops. If DNA sequences code for proteins, sequences are a genome's beliefs. The nuclear beliefs are immutable but conditionally expressed. Chemically arbitrary hormones as words spoken between cellular minds.
Form: Web of regulated (conditionally expressed) genes. Suppression of a gene's expression as disbelief.
Speed: Very slow. Messages must pass into and out of a cell's nucleus.
Feels: Unlikely.
Parallelism: Yes.
Volatility: Very low.
Transparency: Increasingly to present science. Clones as backups.
Mutable: Can a chromosome add to itself within a cell's lifetime? Typically beliefs are at most suppressed and only gained in children by mutation or sex.
The gene-protein language is circular enough—genes are both regulated by proteins and code for proteins—that it could form the complex loops of deeply intelligent behavior.
Then what new useful knowledge can a biologist deduce using my framework? What rank of mind?
What sort of learning might evolution constitute? It may not qualify as learning because the progress only occurs in apparently separate bodies. Can a single cell learn within its lifetime? Might a cell's genes learn through a lasting change in regulation?
Bodily organs as minds. The endocrine system regulates body temperature through the hypothalamus. An animal's body may be a network of hundreds of independent minds, some minds with redundant ends but different means. A learning mind, feeling pain from a high body temperature, can use its learned knowledge—turn on the air conditioner—to reach the same end as the hypothalamus.
Software
Form: Machine language instruction sequence.
Speed: High.
Feels: Unlikely.
Volatility: High. A power loss empties memory. Most storage lacks redundancy.
Parallelism: Very low.
Transparency: High, except with opaque learning algorithms.
Mutable: Optional.
Why define minds in a computer made of transistors? Why not make minds of metal or wood? Because words are easier to change than gears. A computer is a machine that given the right chain of words, the right story, can mimic any other machine. The higher classes of mind are hidden in a maze. We have too little time and too many problems to find and test minds in anything but the most tractable material. First write a working mind in a computer's formal language, then translate it to other mediums.
(while true
(if (not (goal-reached?))
(act)))
Other
What other kinds of matter loop well into minds? Mechanical minds. Quantum minds? Discarnate minds?
Hierarchy
Minds making minds making minds. In every cell, a gene mind. But slow, so they made neuron minds. But too selfish and costly, so they made metal and electronic minds. What might they make? One trend: higher speed. The source of the first natural minds? Evolution, chaos.
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