I have big plans for my work on Minds in 2010, including the launch of a new site "Minds 2.0" in Q2. I thought I'd start the year by recapping some of the most important concepts from the first 10 parts of my video series "Making Minds" (which will continue again soon).
By far the most important concept that drives many of my theories about minds is "a mind is a general concept that is not closely coupled to an individual or a brain". Here's part 2 of the series where I articulated this concept:
The main idea is that any set of interacting minds is itself a mind. For example, each hemisphere of your brain has a mind and when they're connected, they form a larger mind. This has been experimentally verified. Similarly, people in a group each have a mind and the group has a mind of its own. This applies at any level - corporations, countries, worlds, even galaxies have minds!
Because of this, my working definition of a mind is "something that has values and the ability to pursue those values". Different minds have different values, so an individual human mind naturally pursues different goals than the mind of NASA or the mind of the Earth.
If I'm right, and entities like NASA have a mind, then it follows that the mind of NASA has values, goals, senses, imagination, creativity, emotions and consciousness.
The great benefit of looking at a mind as being a general concept and not limited to individual biological brains is that you can try and figure out how a mind works by looking around you. Rather than investing time and money into probing brains on a neural level, you can investigate the mind of a corporation and see how it works.
It's likely that the mechanisms that support values, goals, decisions, imagination, emotions and consciousness are similar regardless of what scale they operate at. My guess is that this is the key to solving the "hard problem" of cognitive science/philosophy.
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