I could have written a book about ending war or feeding the hungry but I wanted to write about something more important: the thing that writes all books and ends all pains, that solves every problem in the endless chain of problems—mind.
There are already too many books on mind, by that name or another. Frankenstein books, made from older books, cut, shuffled, and sewn together. Evidently incomplete because we still lack the means to make powerful minds, beyond encouraging clever humans to breed. Even worse we lack a science of mind with the word rightly defined and every supporting study organized beneath it.
What more have I seen? The working minds I made and the ideas that animated their mindless parts. No hearsay or speculation. No idea prized unless it made a mind more powerful, swift or elegant.
Books by the merely industrious instead revel in the ambiguity of natural language, confuse the issue with a splatter of conflicting official opinions, mention curious but irrelevant facts, or mislead you with unscientific anecdotes.
This book is more ambitious. It is not on philosophy, science or reality, but why and how minds might invent such things. The laws of mind, not the laws of gravity or electricity, but the methods of the mind that made these tools. It is not on brains of neurons, controllers or computers, but the logical possibilities of mind, from minimal axioms deducing all the kinds of mind that are and can ever be. An exhaustive analysis of the fundamental possibilities, not a grab bag of topics. Leave the gory ephemera of human brains to neuroscientists.
This is the first volume of a Euclid's Elements of mind, a universal eternal guide to minds written to be read for ten thousand years. When the Sun is dead, an alien mind or machine mind could read this and not only find it true and useful, like math, as a system to impose on the reader's world, but as a system fitting the reader himself, itself.
No jargon. Instead I take common terms that we presume to be uniquely human or animal—painful, selfish, moral—and show that they apply to all minds of certain classes, whether made of metal, code or cells.
These laws of mind are all that can be true for everyone, everywhere, forever. They can't be false because they made truth. Always true, you need never doubt them. In your mind, they are the last possessions you can lose. By comparison, all other knowledge is trivia.
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