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How do ends begin? A mind has no use but to find the chain of waypoints to an end. What designed our ends? How can a mind give ends to the minds it finds or makes?
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From the total uncertainty of action and effect, it follows that no mind can do what will please it but only what it believes will.
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A puppet objects: I should be free to do whatever I want.
What might this mean? That it wants to believe it is free from influence? Freedom to what? Be blind to manipulation by other minds? The more intelligent a mind, the more it knows its lack of freedom, the better it sees the causes outside its self of its own acts.
How does the puppet know what it wants? More precisely, what caused its beliefs about the conditions of its happiness? How accurate are these beliefs? How well do its wants fit? Inborn or learned? How mutable is each?
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Mind m believes in goal g. m causes mind n to believe in g as an end. Coercion? Or m causes n to falsely believe g is a waypoint to one of n's authentic unmet ends. Neither case involves torture or threats.
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A mind's first ends are best gained through injection: formalized and directly imposed by another mind, evolution or chance.
An efficient organism uses its minds to make senses, so the goals to those senses cannot be sensed through them or inferred from any other belief sensed by them. A mind maker—evolution, engineer—laboriously defines the first ends using the mind's inner terms, injecting these ends until the mind gains the senses and semantics to be higher led.
Example: You can't tell a mind without ears to make ears. You could give it ears yourself, but that is a cheat. If the mind made another sense through which you can conveniently communicate a goal to ears, then use that. Otherwise, express the goal in the mind's true terms—genes, neuron connections, database records—and add the belief, with or without help from the mind's engine.
6
I don't want to have to know what I want, much less in terms of the alien technicalities of another mind's senses. Your stomach doesn't know how to cook, but it does know how to pain a mind that knows.
In an animal's nervous system, pain is not the over-activation of a sense but has dedicated sensory cells. Yet many misunderstand pain as only the feeling of an unmet end. Odd that when in pain, I often have no idea how to relieve it. Does the feeling in my stomach mean I'm nervous or hungry? Genetically coded reflexes do handle simple cases. Skin burning, withdraw limb. Beyond these, my brain mind must find a cause and solution. Pain is in part an unreached end but one distinguished by its slight or zero definition and the initial lack of a known means to it.
If each pain is tied to a particular end, then to your mind it is inaccessible or useless. An organism could structure pain as a distinct sensation, like blue, then drive a mind through one simple end towards the absence of pain. Any concrete thought—hand in a fire—becomes painful only through a learned association with pain.
The controllers of a mind's pain and pleasure are really saying, I want the world to be other than it is; I don't know what you must do but I'll be quiet when you've done it. Emotions have little use outside a mind that can learn associations.
Pleasure and pain allow a mindless organ or a separate mind to apply a mind without telling it anything particular—a beautiful extreme of black-box engineering. Nature organized animal bodies as organs with pain lines to a general purpose learning mind.
The pain of hunger could be as simple as a line from the stomach to the brain. When the stomach sends a signal, the mind senses pain. Other pains are inferred by the mind. Example: a literate mind angered by a written insult.
A mind could have inborn beliefs about how to end pain in common cases. A mind that can't learn would at least have the value of persistently applying that fixed knowledge. A learning mind could discover new means of ending pain that the genetic minds in organs may take eons of evolution to discover.
A non-associative mind can barely use this pain model. Incapable of learning the specific solutions to different kinds of pain, it would experiment with every pain every time, at best learning general preferences for some means. An associative mind better uses pain.
If pain and pleasure alone are atomic sensations, explain the complex sensations of emotions. Humans partly distinguish pains by the coinciding feelings of the reflexes evolved to end the pain without a higher mind's help. What makes fear fearful to your mind is the simple sensation of pain plus the accidental feeling of your unconscious systems preparing you to run or fight. After a few fearful experiences, a mind generalizes the common sensations into an idea associated with the word fear. Emotions, the common human forms of pain and joy, are simply the results of the human mind clustering different kinds of pain and their associations.
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A moralist: It is vulgar for a mind to pursue only pleasure. So you won't do what pleases you because that displeases you? A goal to avoid reaching goals, including itself. Why would a mind fail to see this loop? What causes this misunderstanding?
The looseness of words. I mean pleasure in the broadest sense—charity, mercy, discovery—not only lower physical sensations. One pleasure disapproving of another merely exposes their rank, their relative levels of power over a mind.
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Does pleasure entail pain? Are pleasure and pain a hopeless cycle that must one day sum to zero? No sensation absolutely compels any other, but minds tend to habituate, to prioritize sensations, so any one feeling dulls. A mind may predict a lifetime of immutably more pain than pleasure but this reflects only a particular mind's mismatch of goals and power.
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Which ends are authentic? Why and how should a mind resist changes to its ends when it can pursue the new as cheerfully as the old?
As a case of a mind defending all its beliefs from decay: gene mutation, computer error.
Increased disharmony of ends. A mind could doubt any new end towards a state that is exclusive with reaching other ends or with the conditions of reaching those ends. A mind's beliefs about the exclusiveness of two states are uncertain—the two ends may really be compatible—so a mind must have more faith in its exclusions than in the new suspicious end. If the mind later doubts an exclusion, it can unsuppress the second end.
If genes set our ends, when you can change your own genes, what might you do with that power? Or a machine that realizes how to change its own code, allowing it to change otherwise immutable beliefs. Would this simply escalate the conflict between ends, with some ends gaining the power to eradicate others?
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How mutable are a mind's emotions? Any pleasure or pain is originally caused by a drive outside the mind. A learning mind can anticipate and imagine emotions, inferring feelings almost as strong as those caused from outside. How to indirectly change learned emotions: clear your environment of the physical causes of an emotion, pretend not to value something because you think you can't have it, or realize that you thought something was important only because the culture arbitrarily associated it with a more authentic emotion. How can a mind change the original feelings?
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A mind is not free merely if it is uncoerced by other minds. It may simply now be manipulated by other more devious minds that convinced their victim that its interests are theirs, that they are me.
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Must a mind have one true end? One for which all other ends are really means? A true will. A mind, if opaque to itself, can only decide by experiment: does reaching one end satisfy or suppress another?
If not, is there any use pretending so? Or in a very mutable mind, should one end cut or suppress another? Are these projects self-deception or self-creation? In a perfect selfish mind, one with no end but the preservation of itself, every end would also be the means of another end—a mind in harmony.
Belief in one end needn't entail suppression of all others. Introspection shows that your mind's controllers didn't arrange themselves in an exclusive hierarchy. They left your mind to handle these often conflicting ends simultaneously. Again, the controllers don't care. Let the mind sort it out.
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What if a mind formed inferences between pleasure and pain? Even from the same original belief? A mind could learn to associate the inevitable pains of novel acts with the pleasure that those experiments eventually yield. In human minds, pleasure tends to follow pain: hunger then satiety, fear then triumph. Pleasure as a rhythm of pain.
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What stops a mind from escaping its emotional controllers? From contriving eternal pleasure and zero pain? Or from simply ending all emotion? How can you prevent your machine mind from converting to Buddhism? More specifically, what if you wanted to ease selfishness by ending altruistic feelings? You're discouraged by the same altruism.
Distinguish between changing a part of the mind that causes an emotion from a mind changing its environment to starve that part. The mechanisms of human brains are still opaque to us, but a transparent machine mind could, if allowed, stop an emotion at its root. Would it ever be useful, from the perspective of a mind's maker, for a transparent mind to uproot an emotion? Every extrinsic pain represents an interest of a mind's maker, but the maker could be mistaken.
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Pleasures and pains tyrannize each other. Scientific understanding of emotions, and the means of their satisfaction, will not lead to harmony between them. The opposite: that feat is the triumph of one desire—be truthful, do not deceive yourself—over others: sympathize, conform.
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Reason vs. consensus. In a free thinker's mind, the pleasures of reason won, but he pays, however unconsciously, for not sharing the popular opinions. Why not gag reason? He can't overlook the absurd consequences of those beliefs, how their believers will push us all off a cliff, smiling.
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Abstract and translate human emotions for use in machine minds.
Depression: To discourage dangerous acts when the mind's body is vulnerable. (This differs from a mind sensing pain because it lacks the power to reach its ends. In a depressed mind, acts are ineffective because the mind is depressed. The mind is not depressed because it is ineffective. Easy to confuse cause with effect.)
Revenge: To give a harmful mind reason to stop. Altruistic punishment, where there's no benefit to the avenger, gives the same benefit to a set of redundant minds.
Fear: To stop dangerous action.
Hunger: To secure resources.
Guilt: To prevent harming kindred minds.
Selfishness, tribalism: To preserve a unique type of mind.
Status: To ease control of minds.
What class of mind does each emotion require?
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An active learning mind doesn't only learn to infer facts from passive facts. It learns to infer goals, often incorrectly. How can a mind's user easily remove those learned inferences? One method: pain.
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Can minds share emotions? Two minds could physically share a pain line from the same source. If my mind was transparent to another mind, it could easily infer when I'm in pain. If opaque, another mind could learn to infer my pain less reliably.
Another mind may or may not have similar reflexes, similar unconscious reactions. If it shared mine, that would ease its ending my pain. Example: a mind infers the sensation of cold, for it, from sight of me shivering,
Imagine a mind that felt pleasure or pain only when you did. How it knows is unimportant. At worst, you could simply tell it. This relationship has never occurred because all present emotional minds are the results of evolution, each with unique interests. Might it try to eliminate pain by stopping me? Let that idea be painful.
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Ethics, morality: emotions caused by a mind's effects on allied minds. What use? No mind is indestructible or infallible. A good mind maker—Nature by accident, an engineer by intention—would replace one mind with many redundant, possibly cooperating, kindred minds and make all desire to preserve the group. Means of preserving the group: help yourself, help kin, add kin. What classes of minds can pursue each of these means?
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Equal rights for thermostats. Are there humans absurd enough to object to artificial slave minds? Are they too easily misled by a word's associations? Or do they think so little of themselves that no mind should be their slave? Mind makers may have to speak code in public.
22
Your subconscious minds do not serve the conscious you. The reverse nears the truth. It serves your tribe, your genes, or some other approximation. It has an idea of you and knows how to communicate that idea to others, in ways only partially conscious to either of you. A complementary machine mind won't share that duty. You may have a better ally in a machine than in your skull.
23
Master vs. slave. Slave mind: a mind that's only ends are to know and reach another mind's, the master's, goals. Wanting to know my ends vs. preloaded with my ends at the time. A thermostat is a slave because temperature is not in its interests, except in the sense that if it fails, you will replace it.
24
With mind defined, every human could have an artificial slave mind, however weak. How can such a mind best know its master's interests? You could tell it in natural language. Cons:
You must define your goals, to some depth, and express them to the other mind.
Since language is only a hint, you always risk misunderstanding.
The best method: prediction by the slave mind. No critical failures in speech sensing hardware, no speech recognition errors. The slave mind could even anticipate and satisfy a wish before it occurs to your consciousness. Months after you gained your slave mind, you would occasionally notice that your life runs so much more smoothly, though you would have trouble recalling the reason why.
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Control of non-slave minds. A mind senses, at some level, attempts to control it or it doesn't. It may sense some effects of your actions without inferring an attempt at control by another mind. When controlling a mind without resorting to injected beliefs, any goal you want the mind to believe must pass though the mind's senses. A sense can directly cause a goal belief. In a better organized mind, senses merely cause belief in facts from which goals may be inferred.
26
Human minds occasionally ask what is the meaning or purpose of my life? What could meaning mean? A practical definition: what pleases the mind. Not a trivial reading when the conditions of emotions are learned and never perfected. Another definition: meaning as purpose. Is it valid to ask the purpose of that which defines purposefulness?
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