Kinds of Minds

„Our minds are just like the minds of other animals in many respects and utterly unlike them in others.”

„each of us knows exactly one mind from the inside, and no two of us know the same mind from the inside.”

„We human beings share a subjective world—and know that we do—in a way that is entirely beyond the capacities of any other creatures on the planet, because we can talk to one another.”

„Conversation unites us.”

„Words, by being the most powerful tools of communication, are also the most powerful tools of deception and manipulation. But while it may be easy to lie, it’s almost as easy to catch a liar—especially when the lies get large and the logistical problem of maintaining the structure of falsehood overwhelms the liar.”

„Don’t confuse ontological questions (about what exists) with epistemological questions (about how we know about it).”

„There haven’t always been minds. We have minds, but we haven’t existed forever. We evolved from beings with simpler minds (if minds they were), who evolved from beings with still simpler candidates for minds.”

„those with the misfortune to be genetically designed so that they seek what is bad for them leave no descendants in the long run.”

„In order to think about something, you must have a way—one way among many possible ways—of thinking about it.”

„one of the primary desires of any living intentional system is the desire for the food needed to fuel growth, self-repair, and reproduction, so every living thing needs to distinguish the food (the good material) from the rest of the world. It follows that another primary desire is to avoid becoming the food of another intentional system.”

„There is no taking without the possibility of mistaking.”

„Which of us today could formulate the argument and amass the crucial evidence without looking for help in a book?”

„There is no limit, apparently, to what we can believe, and to what we can distinguish in belief.”

„Propositions, alas, are not as well-behaved theoretical entities as numbers. Propositions are more like dollars than numbers!”

„The task of a mind is to produce future, as the poet Paul Valéry once put it. A mind is fundamentally an anticipator, an expectation-generator. It mines the present for clues, which it refines with the help of the materials it has saved from the past, turning them into anticipations of the future. And then it acts, rationally, on the basis of those hard-won anticipations.”

„Circumstances in the world might change, for instance—making the old version better after all. Or the extra copy of the old version might someday get mutated into something of value.”

„In order for us to see things as mindful, they have to happen at the right pace, and when we do see something as mindful, we don’t have much choice; the perception is almost irresistible.”

„Producing future is no use to any intentional system if its “predictions”

„What makes something a mind (or a belief, or a pain, or a fear) is not what it is made of, but what it can do.”

„what minds do is process information; minds are the control systems of bodies, and in order to execute their appointed duties they need to gather, discriminate, store, transform, and otherwise process information about the control tasks they perform.”

„when you make a mind, the materials matter.”

„There is no more anger or fear in adrenaline than there is silliness in a bottle of whiskey.”

„These substances, per se, are as irrelevant to the mental as gasoline or carbon dioxide. It is only when their abilities to function as components of larger functional systems depend on their internal composition that their so-called “intrinsic nature”

„In principle (as many philosophers have argued), I might even trade in my current brain for another, by replacing the medium while preserving only the message. I could travel by teleportation, for instance, as long as the information was perfectly preserved. In principle, yes—but only because one would be transmitting information about the whole body, not just the nervous system. One cannot tear me apart from my body leaving a nice clean edge, as philosophers have often supposed. My body contains as much of me, the values and talents and memories and dispositions that make me who I am, as my nervous system does. The legacy of Descartes’s notorious dualism of mind and body extends far beyond academia into everyday thinking: “These athletes are prepared both mentally and physically,”

„There’s nothing wrong with your body—it’s all in your mind.”

„It is harder to think functionalistically about the mind once we abandon the crisp identification of the mind with the brain and let it spread to other parts of the body, but the compensations are enormous.”

„Body am I, and soul”

„spirit”

„By means of these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, and so on, nature also teaches that I am present to my body not merely in the way a seaman is present to his ship, but that I am tightly joined and, so to speak, mingled together with it, so much so that I make up one single thing with it.”

„For more sophisticated engagements with the world, a swifter, farther- seeing mind is called for, one that can produce more and better future.”

„In order to see farther ahead in time, it helps to see farther into space.”

„science makes progress only when it poses refutable hypotheses”

„curiosity—epistemic hunger—must drive any powerful learning system.”

„“Sentience”

„robotic,”

„human.”

„One of Darwin’s fundamental insights is that design is expensive but copying designs is cheap; that is, making an all new design is very difficult, but redesigning old designs is relatively easy.”

„Advanced kinds of learning depend, in fact, on prior capacities for (re-)identification.”

„the more ingeniously you investigate the competence of nonhuman animals, the more likely you are to discover abrupt gaps in competence.”

„We human beings, thanks to the perspective we gain from our ability to reflect in our special ways, can discern failures of tracking that would be quite beyond the ken of other beings.”

„Language was invented so that people could conceal their thoughts from each other.”

„A first-order intentional system has beliefs and desires about many things, but not about beliefs and desires. A second-order intentional system has beliefs and desires about beliefs and desires, its own or those of others. A third-order intentional system would be capable of such feats as wanting you to believe that it wanted something, while a fourth-order intentional system might believe you wanted it to believe that you believed something, and so forth.”

„Communication favors clear-cut answers.”

„If you and the other potentially competitive agents in the vicinity all have access to pretty much the same information about the environment, then it is next to impossible for circumstances to arise in which you can turn such a temporary information-gradient to your advantage.”

„Commando Team Principle: give each agent as much knowledge about the total project as possible, so that the team has a chance of ad-libbing appropriately when unanticipated obstacles arise.”

„We human beings have the capacity for swift, insightful learning— learning that does not depend on laborious training but is ours as soon as we contemplate a suitable symbolic representation of the knowledge.”

„our natural minds are equipped to deal with changes that occur only at particular paces.”

„This mindless mapping of complex data into simpler, more natural or user- friendly formats is, as we have seen, a hallmark of increasing intelligence.”

„We keep “pointers”

„indices”

„If the untrained infant’s mind is to become an intelligent one, it must acquire both discipline and initiative.”

„There is no step more uplifting, more explosive, more momentous in the history of mind design than the invention of language.”

„What is true of the species is just as true of the individual.”

„birds don’t have to learn their feathers and babies don’t have to learn their language.”

„A word can become familiar even without being understood.”

„the mere contemplation of a representation is sufficient to call to mind all the appropriate lessons.”

„It’s easy enough to see why a mind seems miraculous, when one has no sense of all the components and of how they got made. Each component has a long design history, sometimes billions of years long.”

„Know-how is a kind of wisdom, a kind of useful information, but it is not represented knowledge.”

„Mental contents become conscious not by entering some special chamber in the brain, not by being transduced into some privileged and mysterious medium, but by winning the competitions against other mental contents for domination in the control of behavior, and hence for achieving long-lasting effects—or as we misleadingly say, “entering into memory.”

„The acts and events you can tell us about, and the reasons for them, are yours because you made them—and because they made you. What you are is that agent whose life you can tell about. You can tell us, and you can tell yourself.”

„What makes a mind powerful—indeed, what makes a mind conscious—is not what it is made of, or how big it is, but what it can do.”

„There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

„the difference, whatever it is, between a nondissociated child and a dissociated child is a difference that markedly affects the existence or amount of suffering.”

„If we are concerned to discover and ameliorate unacknowledged instances of suffering in the world, we need to study creatures’ lives, not their brains. What happens in their brains is of course highly relevant as a rich source of evidence about what they are doing and how they do it, but what they are doing is in the end just as visible—to a trained observer—as the activities of plants, mountain streams, or internal combustion engines. If we fail to find suffering in the lives we can see (studying them diligently, using all the methods of science), we can rest assured that there is no invisible suffering somewhere in their brains. If we find suffering, we will recognize it without difficulty. It is all too familiar.”