Mentality

(AKA "mindness" etc.)

Why talk about minds?

There are some things in the world that we call "minds". Their degree of mindness varies along several dimensions and is often not clear. We want to understand how these things work.

Mind-projection fallacy: a cautionary note

In trying to do that, we are provisionally assuming that the category of "minds" is the "natural category" or at least the right category to have in our ontology. This poses a risk of blinding ourselves to the possibility that thinking in terms of a category "minds" is not the best way to think if we want to understand minds. Perhaps the theory that would give us a comprehensive understanding of minds will not be a theory of minds.

To give a (perhaps somewhat stretchy) historical example, we didn't advance our understanding of life by developing a theory of élan vital. The advance in our understanding of life involved ditching the concept of élan vital entirely. Similarly, we advanced our understanding of light's propagation through space not by developing a theory of luminiferous aether but by ditching the concept entirely. Ditto phlogiston. In all these cases, we wanted to understand some class of seemingly related phenomena, postulated that they share some substance-essence, and wanted to understand this substance-essence. Typically, this doesn't work because, typically, there is no substance-essence. Typically, the essence, when it exists, takes the form not of a substance but of a system of robust principles that apply to certain classes of phenomena. (Obviously, we can then recurse and ask why do those principles apply.)

This class of examples is somewhat stretchy because I am not aware of anybody claiming that mentality has some substance-essence. But the substance-essence fallacy is a special case of the mind projection fallacy, i.e. taking the way we model things (or the way things appear to us) to correspond to how they really are. (The "how they really are" part is tricky and I intend to develop it further, somewhere, at some point.)

Noogenesis (mind-generation)

There is no primal élan mental. Minds are composed of material stuff. A mind comes into existence due to some process arranging matter in a particular way. What are the processes that arrange matter in mind-y ways?

Why are we interested in noogenetic (mind-generating) processes? Because knowing the general laws governing/describing those processes and constraints on noogenesis would give us knowledge of what possible minds can arise by what possible processes and how one might those shape/[intervene in] those processes to get them produce the minds that one wants.

Biological evolution

Biological minds were brought into the world via a selection process, i.e. biological evolution of the Terran type.¹ In some evolutionary contexts, there was a selection pressure for mindness, meaning that minds were sometimes useful. In general, it seems that minds are useful for navigating complex environments,² whose complexity can be exploited for one's gain. In those cases, the benefits of minds outweighed the costs of minds. Humans are an extreme case of that among animals in that we pay the costs of mindness in difficult child birth because our big heads stretch the limits of what a human birth canal can handle.

So, here's a question we may be interested in:

An answer to this question would shed light on what drove the particular noogenetic process that resulted in animal minds in general and human minds in particular.^[subprocess]

It should be distinguished from the following question:

³

If a mind is for some X, then it must be at least as good at X (good for X) for this competence to produce an evolutionary pressure. On the other hand, a mind can be good for some X but not being for X, e.g. can be very good at discovering and producing addictive compounds that it then gets occupied with, eliminating the genes (or whatever their equivalents) responsible for this competence and/or tendency from the gene pool.

In Complexity and the Function of Mind in Nature,⁴ Peter Godfrey-Smith calls the former teleonomic functions for "what minds are for" and Cummins functions⁵ for "what minds are good for".

I am using the term "biological evolution" broadly, to include all noogenetic processes that occur (or at least can occur) without intervention of minds; noogenetic cranes, rather than skyhooks. The only way for this to work is via a very trial-and-error(-like) process. A mind is being gradually refined via something like a random walk. But many steps in this random walk are deadly, so you can't experiment with a sample size of one mind. You need a population of minds; or rather, you need a population of minds where more adequate minds have a reproductive advantage over less adequate minds. That's a hand-wavy argument saying that minds found/grown via biological evolution (Terran or non-Terran) necessarily come in packages and can reproduce. There's probably another hand-wavy but sensible and bio-evo-general argument that this noo-reproduction needs to happen via regrowing the new mind from scratch, rather than growing an excess and splitting like an amoeba. This would give us another noogenetic process, regrowing an evolved mind from the ~genetic "seed". Ontogenesis derived from phylogenesis.

(TBC)

Dimensions of mindness

We can define tentative dimensions/aspects of mindness and explore how they relate to each other.

• Internal sharing of elements (ISoE)
  • Every element is potentially accessible to and usable by every other module/component/process (element?) of the mind.
  • All of the mind speaks in the same "language" or there's a sufficient within-mind interoperability to enable reliable within-mind communication.
  • Something like global workspace would be sometimes useful but we might want a more specific mechanism of where should a given element (thought?) go.
    • For that kind of stuff, we might want a market: suggestors betting not just on what elements to put out there but also where any given element should go.
      • This is assuming a degree of compartmentalization. Subsystems having some cognitive/ideatic resources that they want to make use of.
  • ISoE may be a prerequisite for a robust referential capacity.
• Richness of thought / referential capacity / far-reach
  • The mind can express a lot of stuff.
  • The mind can refer to a lot of stuff, even very distant and/or abstract stuff.
  • Far-reach is something like the ability to direct oneself (or an element) to things very distant from oneself in some "space", like ~spacetime but also some kind of "logical space"/reason-space.
  • Optimization at a distance; consequentialism.
• Creativity
  • Endogenous generation of novelty.
  • Increases richness of thought etc.
• Self-{reference,awareness,improvement}, recursive thought, reflection
  • Taking oneself as just another thing to [refer to]/[think about]/optimize.
  • Straightforwardly enhances the other three (or at least has the potential to enhance the other three).

Minds and thinking

I'm inclined to take thinking as the basic thing that minds do and that minds should be defined in terms of capacity for.

But what is thought/thinking?

Intentionality

Mentality/thinking involves intentionality. Thoughts are about something/[some Things].

It seems to me that intentionality is the/a main thing (or at least currently most-salient-to-me thing) about minds. Minds have thoughts/elements that [are about other things]/[refer to other things]. There may be some degree of discontinuity between percepts and thoughts, but it nevertheless seems to me that when I perceive a bike, my perception of the bike is in the same way "about" the bike as my "disconnected"/"off-line" thought about the same bike.

A mind that has no currently active representational elements (e.g. in some extreme meditative state) is still a mind. A patient in a vegetative state or deep coma no longer has a mind. On the other hand, a patient in the locked-in syndrome does have a mind, even if they are incapable of doing anything in the «external» world with their mind.⁶

This inclines me to see a mind as a base of cognitive/referential capacity capable of sustaining/spawning new thoughts/[mental/referential elements].

Can we do without "intentionality"?

A mind can operate with "mere structures", play with those structure-elements by composing them according to some laws/principles/"language"/"grammar", without imposing any reference criterion. This seems like an OK-ish way of thinking about [minds thinking about particular mathy/logical things or even fictional entities].

Mere babble-pieces of structure need not have any reference. The entire process of operating on those pieces according to some rules can be said to have reference. E.g. operating according to some set of algebraic laws can be said to refer to groups, monoids, etc.

Similarly, operating on elements cooked up when interacting with a particular person such that some properties of this person are being preserved can be said to refer to this person.

Does it mean that all of reference is "merely" "about" obeying⁷ some structures of a distant thingy when locally (effectively) operating on some elements?

What are pre-minds?

• What is a pre-mind? (ie a thing that is not (quite) a mind but would become a mind if you added a little bit more stuff.)
• What pieces of Magic can/need we assume to build a mind thinking entity?