Mind

Full Title or Meme

1. If a carbon-based life form = Nature + Nurture.
2. If a silicon-based life form = Software + Data Store.

Context

The intersection between real-world minds and digital Entities with their Artificial Intelligence.

Problem

• Philosophers and pundits of all types have been working a both the value of a definition and the definition of Mind for many generations.

Some of our perplexities may come from a mismatch between the purposes for which our cognitive faculties evolved and the purposes to which we put them today. … Our minds keep us in touch with aspects of reality — such as objects, animals, and people — that our ancestors dealt with for millions of years. But as science and technology open up new and hidden worlds, our untutored intuitions may find themselves at sea.

…we have no mental tools to grasp [these subjects] intuitively. We depend on analogies that press an old mental faculty into service, or on jerry-built mental contraptions that wire together bits and pieces of other faculties. Understanding in these domains is likely to be uneven, shallow, and contaminated by primitive intuitions.

• New learning has shown that the brain we were endowed with at birth needs lots of training to become the Mind that an adult uses without much concern. In that way it is much like the search tool in your handy internet connected computing device on your desk or in your pocket, a composition of many components in different locations. And they both allows you to roll time backward and forward to the future. Turning your Mind into a time machine.

It was believed that aspects of the mind had specific brain locations. .... Your mid is, in fact, an ongoing construction of your brain your body and the surrounding world. A second ingredient of your experience is sense data from events inside your body. The third ingredient is past experience. Without this the incoming sense data would be meaningless.

Solution

• Minds all come with some sort of self-aware sub-system that knows when it needs something else and can reach out to Knowledge coded in some form by other life forms.
• The human mind has limited short-term memory and long-term memory, but it works very quickly and remembers things that are important to its survival.
• The artificial mind can be purpose-built to handle specific problems, most of which are not well handled by the human mind.
• So emulate the human mind only for those tasks for which it was evolved.

References

1. Brain
2. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate. 2009-12-01 ISBN 978-0670031511
3. Lisa Feldman Barrett, How your Mind was Made MIT Technology Review 2021-09 Vol. 123 No 5 pp 8 ff.