What is the mind?

[IDMclean]

Simple question, complex answer.

 

What constitutes the mind, the psyche, personality, consciousness, conscience, or otherwise?

 

There is allot about philosophical zombies and such out there. Theories of AI from many different fields, and not many of them in agreement or parallel with one another.

 

What makes, shapes and drives a mind? What are it's origins and how does one develop?

 

Philosophy of the Mind

Theory of the Mind

Holonomic Brain Theory

Artifical Intellegence

[Buffy]

We are being held hostage to our preconcieved notions not only of physiology but of psychology and spirituality. AI has to date failed--not that it won't ever succeed--precisely because people have been uncritical about their preconceived notions of how the brain works. I'm convinced most of these notions are *wrong*. If we sit down with KAC's challenge and start to completely pick apart *all* of the definitions of terms associated with "the mind" and start over from scratch, I think we might get somewhere.

 

Great topic KAC. Blast away!

 

Mindful of mindlessness,

Buffy

[IDMclean]

I ask because I have an model for a Conceptual AI which I am working on and have been since I perceived the conception that is AI. That is became aware of the possibility.

 

In order to perfect the model, I need to better understand what makes me, me, and us, us. Not in any manner of impercise approximations either. Computers do not allow for very large margins of error and the development of a emergent entity such as an AI is no arbitrary design.

 

I note that in the study of this subject, there appears to be only light cross over from the various fields.

 

Here are some key words in the common discussion of the mind.

Ego

Self

Identity

Conscious

Conscience

Sentience

Memory

Psyche

Mind

Personality

Volition

Will

Behavior

Affect

Emotion

Feeling

Desire

Need

Want

Thought

Perception

Imagination

Intellect

Reason

Meme

Subconscious

Preconscious

Holon

[Buffy]

You put meme in this list and I'll refer you to my post in your meme thread.

 

The interesting thing about this list is that it has exactly the same problem as "creating a meme" and its the trap that most AI efforts have fallen into: "Lets pick a concept that is really hard to explain--to the point that we can't even really define what it is (take "ego" for example--and lets write a computer algorithm to implement it." Same problem that you keep beating people up for in your game design thread, KAC: jumping into implementation is a sure way to fail.

 

Here though, its worse: the terms are so vague and ill defined, there's no way to figure out where to start. They're vague because they rely on shared experience for which there is no explanatory model.

 

More importantly, as I've alluded to elsewhere, these concepts you've listed are indeed--as you say in passing--EMERGENT qualities. I don't think we can *design* them, I think we will create them by accident!

 

Why don't we try some simpler things like, "recognition". Do you *really* know what that word means? Try it out....

 

Unsimple,

Buffy

[wine]

The mind occured when the brain became dense and impulses became thoughts that were focused on by what I like to call the third eye,

 

Which isn't an eye anymore than it is a nose.

 

The mind is the lightning

is the access

is the memory

is the focus.

[InfiniteNow]

When individuals refer to the third eye, they are generally referring to what has evolved into the pineal gland. However, some lizards still use this "eye" to detect transitions from light to dark.

[infamous]

Simple question, complex answer.

 

What constitutes the mind, the psyche, personality, consciousness, conscience, or otherwise?

 

The mind of man: The deductive process whereby he defines himself and his enviornment.....................Infy

[IDMclean]

The mind of man: The deductive process whereby he defines himself and his enviornment.....................Infy

 

Ok, What all does this define? Personality implies behaviors and affects which are measurable by the "outside" world. Also why deductive, why not inductive? If that is the mind then can it ever cease to function? When we die, what is lost?

 

Your definition though simple, is lacking in crucial descriptive content. I would suggest checking it against the fallacies of definition. I can no more model a mind by such a drop of water in the lake than I could form a dinning room from a chair.

[infamous]

I can no more model a mind by such a drop of water in the lake than I could form a dinning room from a chair.

Or, make a mountain out of a molehill................Infy

[Kriminal99]

I made a thread called "a new belief set" earlier and have not really finished it. In it are the beginnings of a model of the human mind that if understood, is completely coherent with everything that people do, experience, and all scientific data we have collected on the human mind.

 

Using this I would just say that the mind is something which processes perceptions and controls our body based on emotional motivators. We are kind of just along for the ride, but the ride is defined by the raw feels of emotions and perceptions. The human mind could be defined by exactly the same model as I have laid out (which does not speculate so much on the physical), but each emotion could feel different and every sound sight taste etc could be different as well.

[IDMclean]

You put meme in this list and I'll refer you to my post in your meme thread.

 

The interesting thing about this list is that it has exactly the same problem as "creating a meme" and its the trap that most AI efforts have fallen into: "Lets pick a concept that is really hard to explain--to the point that we can't even really define what it is (take "ego" for example--and lets write a computer algorithm to implement it." Same problem that you keep beating people up for in your game design thread, KAC: jumping into implementation is a sure way to fail.

 

Here though, its worse: the terms are so vague and ill defined, there's no way to figure out where to start. They're vague because they rely on shared experience for which there is no explanatory model.

 

More importantly, as I've alluded to elsewhere, these concepts you've listed are indeed--as you say in passing--EMERGENT qualities. I don't think we can *design* them, I think we will create them by accident!

 

Why don't we try some simpler things like, "recognition". Do you *really* know what that word means? Try it out....

 

Unsimple,

Buffy

 

I've taken a few years to contemplate the vagaries of your argument, and I have progressed through a several iterations of reason regarding minds, language, stimulus, sentience, self-awareness, and the likes.

 

Thus far, I have come to conceive of a mind as a recursive pattern which takes its state as a parameter and produces a context-driven mutation of that state as its output. A necessary condition of this is the mind must possess sentience and self-sentience in particular. It must have a means to perceive that which is distinct from itself and itself. This strongly indicates a parallel processing, multiple input, multiple output family of programs that self-manage and self-structure. I think from this basic setup, a rudimentary discrete artificial intelligence can emerge.

 

I have yet to formally integrate the conditions of communication--internal and external, of context sentience, and of persistent memory into the hypothetical model of an artificial mind; however, I feel that they are fundamentally important to any system which would foster the emergence of intelligence.

 

For clarifications, I define sentience simply as the ability to sense phenomena and I define intelligence as the ability of an entity to adapt to changes in its environment and within itself.

 

On that note, I conjecture that humankind has already produced its first collective artificial intelligence. The Internet is the largest most intelligent machine known. I would argue that counter to intuitions about the form of artificial intelligence, the intelligence that has emerged is one driven by people aided by programs and frameworks rather than by programming alone. Furthermore, I would contend that human beings form the core of its program, acting as living neurons, neurotransmitters, glial, etc. I speculate that the recognition of this development and its subsequent examination will most likely lead to the development of the first autonomous discrete artificial intelligence in human history.

 

Anyway as always, thank you Buffy for your thoughtful and thought invoking post,

The Clown

[Buffy]

You're welcome! :eek:

 

Work on those definitions though:

 

For clarifications, I define sentience simply as the ability to sense phenomena and I define intelligence as the ability of an entity to adapt to changes in its environment and within itself.

Might be able to argue that a paramecium or at least an earthworm satisfies that test....

 

The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it, :lol:

Buffy

[IDMclean]

In my view, a paramecium is both sentient and intelligent in an extremely limited manner, but I doubt a paramecium is self-sentient. In fact, I would bet most of the animal kingdom lacks self-sentience. A telling indication to me is the mirror test.

 

I suppose my definition of a sentient self-aware/sentient intelligent entity would venture into what might be called sapience.

[IDMclean]

I came across this in my research, I think it addresses some of the concerns discussed in this thread.

 

I, Quantum Robot: Quantum Mind control on a Quantum Computer by Paola Zizzi

[coberst]

When I speak of mind almost everyone thinks of a stand alone entity functioning in a logical manner in which the body is merely a house for its place of habitation until death, at which time it, sometimes called the soul, floats away to a spiritual kingdom.

 

I have coined the word body-mind, which I first discovered by reading Mark Johnson’s book The Meaning of the Body, because I wish the reader to think not of the mind as a separate entity residing in the body but because I want the reader to think of a body-mind gestalt. That is to say that the mind is an embodied mind, which cannot stand alone just as the heart cannot stand alone with the body bracketed.

[dieadderalls]

The mind is all that you are truly in control of.

 

(imo)

 

If you're an adherent of biological determinism this has implications for your mind, basically that you aren't in control of it. However there have been studies which show that consciousness receives information after it has occurred in physical reality. I can't remember the details, but it involved various stimuli and brain scans which showed that "eureka moment", "satori" or understanding to occur momentarily after the event had taken place.

However the mind feeds back into the body, becoming infinitely more confusing.

THEN on top of that you have psychology, ego, id etc.

 

It's a huge topic, idk how one could address it so briefly :/

 

Maybe have a read of some Aldous Huxley, chuck in some Jung and that might have covered the basics. Or you could just drop a tab :3