Can there be minds within minds? I think not.
The train of thought I’m pursuing here started in a conversation with a friend (let’s call him Fidel) who somehow manages to remain not only an orthodox member of the Church of England, but one who is apparently quite untroubled by any reservations, doubts, or issues about the theology involved. Now of course we don’t all see Christianity the same way. Maybe Fidel sees it differently from me. For many people (I think) religion seems to be primarily a social organisation of people with a broadly similar vision of what is good, derived mainly from the teachings of Jesus. To me, and I suspect to most people who are likely to read this, it’s primarily a set of propositions, whose truth, falsity, and consistency is the really important matter. To them it’s a club, to us it’s a theory. I reckon the martyrs and inquisitors who formed the religion, who were prepared to die or kill over formal assent to a point of doctrine, were actually closer to my way of thinking on this, but there we are.
Be that as it may, my friend cunningly used the problems (or mysteries) of his religion as a weapon against me. You atheists are so complacent, he said, you think you’ve got it all sorted out with your little clockwork science universe, but you don’t appreciate the deep mysteries, beyond human understanding. There are more things in heaven and earth…
But that isn’t true at all, I said. If you think current physics works like clockwork, you haven’t been paying attention. And there are lots of philosophical problems where I have only reasonable guesses at the answer, or sometimes, even on some fundamental points, little idea at all. Why, I said injudiciously, I don’t understand at all what reality itself even is. I can sort of see that to be real is to be part of a historical process characterised by causality, but what that really means and why there is anything like that, what the hell is really going on with it…? Ah, said Fidel, what a confession! Well, when you’re ready to learn about reality, you know where to come…
I don’t, though. The trouble is, I don’t think Christianity really has any answers for me on this or many other metaphysical points. Maybe it’s just my ignorance of theology talking here, but it seems to me just as Christianity tells us that people are souls and then falls largely silent on how souls and spirits work and what they are, it tells us that God made the world and withholds any useful details of how and what. I know that Buddhism and Taoism tell us pretty clearly that reality is an illusion; that seems to raise other issues but it’s a respectable start. The clearest Christian answer I can come up with is Berkeley’s idealism; that is, that to be real is to be within the mind of God; the world is whatever God imagines or believes it to be.
That means that we ourselves exist only because we are among the contents of God’s mind. Yet we ourselves are minds, so that requires it to be true that minds can exist within minds (yes, at last I am getting to the point). I don’t think a mind can exist within another mind. The simplest way to explain is perhaps as follows; a thought that exists within a mind, that was generated by that mind, belongs to that mind. So if I am sustaining another mind by my thoughts, all of its thoughts are really generated by me, and of course they are within my mind. So they remain my thoughts, the secondary mind has none that are truly its own – and it doesn’t really exist. In the same way, either God is thinking my thoughts for me – in which case I’m just a puppet – or my thoughts are outside his mind, in which case my reality is grounded in something other than the Divine mind.
That might help explain why God would give us free will, and so on; it looks as if Berkeley must have been perfectly wrong: in fact reality is exactly the quality possessed by those things that are outside God’s mind. Anyway, my grip of theology is too weak for my thoughts on the matter to be really worth reading (so I owe you an apology); but the idea of minds within minds arises in AI related philosophy, too; perhaps in relation to Nick Bostrom’s argument that we are almost certainly part of a computer simulation. That argument rests on the idea that future folk with advanced computing tech will produce perfect simulations of societies like their own, which will themselves go on to generate similar simulations, so that most minds, statistically, are likely to be simulated ones. If minds can’t exist within other minds, might we be inclined to doubt that they could arise in mind-like simulations?
Suppose for the sake of argument that we have a conscious mind that is purely computational; its mind arises from the computations it performs. Why should such a program not contain, as some kind of subroutine or something, a distinct process that has the same mind-generating properties? I don’t think the answer is obvious, and it will depend on your view of consciousness. For me it’s all about recognition; a conscious mind is a process whose outputs are conditioned by the recognition of future and imagined entities. So I would see two alternatives; either the computational mind we supposed to exist has one locus of recognition, or two. If it has one, the secondary mind can only be a puppet; if there are two, then whatever the computational relationship, the secondary process is independent in a way that means it isn’t truly within the primary mind.
That doesn’t seem to give me the anti-Bostrom argument I thought might be there, and let’s be honest, the notion of a ‘locus of recognition’ could possibly be attacked. If God were doing my thinking, I feel it would be a bit sharper than this…
In the 90’s I worked with colleagues on ways of organising multi-agent systems. There seemed to be value in organising these in a hierarchy in which emergent behaviour at each level in the hierarchy gives rise to useful properties of the whole – such as the ability to behave as a market in order to provide services efficiently. There is a direct analogy with human organisations, in which we naturally organise ourselves in this way. In my work on consciousness, I see no reason that it cannot exist in an organisation, just as in an individual mind, but with a longer time and spatial scale.
{{tutorials.jenkov.com/java/fields.html}}
Jump to “Static and Non-static Fields ‘and Constant Fields'” – In Java, static fields belongs to the class, not instances of the class. Thus, all instances of any class will access the same static field variable. A non-static field value can be different for every object (instance) of a class. … A field declared static and final is also called a “constant”.
I added Constant Fields to make it a threesome (Trinity)…
Its possible its always more than causal…
Can there be minds within minds? I think so.
The problem here is that you have not defined “mind” very well. If you define the “mind of a system” as the collection of mental processes that the system can perform, then it’s easy to have minds within minds.
We can use your definition of “a process whose outputs are conditioned by the recognition of future and imagined entities” as the definition of a mental process. Now, by “recognition of future entities” I will assume you mean recognition of a pattern that represents future entities. (Otherwise you would have some ‘splaining to do.)
So let’s say system M has a mind which includes at least the ability to recognize pattern A as representing a future entity and generates an appropriate output X. Let’s say mind N can recognize pattern B and output Y. Let’s say mind C can recognize X+Y and output Z. None of these minds can recognize A+B and output Z, but the combination of A, B, and C can.
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[errr…. I meant the combination of M,N, and C … lost track of my patterns, apparently]
I wonder if Fidel’s thinking on consciousness is anything like this minority “substance dualism” camp: https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Substance-Dualism/48. Could you ask him for us? It’d be great to get his, yours, and all views “canonized” to find out what all experts think. Either way, this camp and most other experts support “Representational Qualia Theory”: https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6 . I’m wondering if your thinking is compatible with that? That theory predicts computer information is abstracted away from physical qualities. Any set of physics can represent a one, but only if you have an interpretation mechanism to get the one, from that particular set of physics. We, on the other hand, represent information directly on physical qualities, like redness and greenness. An abstract word like red, in a computer, is obviously not red, while our knowledge of a red things has a redness physical quality.
The club vs theory dichotomy is interesting. I read a book a few years ago that characterized churches as essentially family rearing support groups. But as someone who once tried to be in the club without buying the theory, I can say membership usually requires that you accept the theory, or at least pretend like you do.
I come down on the side of thinking that a mind can be contained in another mind, provided the host mind is sufficiently sophisticated enough. Of course, as James mentioned, this can come down to exactly how we choose to define “mind”. But unless we add explicit constraints on the definition to exclude such an arrangement, I can’t see any reason why it couldn’t exist.
Granted, I’m saying this as a relentless functionalist who sees a mind as a type of information processing system. I regularly work with virtual machines, computers implemented in software. Much of the web is hosted from such machines. The idea of a mind being implemented in another mind seems to fit into a similar paradigm.
Understanding metaphysical via ‘useful details of how “souls and spirits” work and what they are’…
…Humanity has semantically made many words, like soul and spirit…
If we know what a soul or spirit is, then we want to experience it…
If we don’t know what a soul or a spirit is, then we want to know what it is, so we can want to experience it…
This about where we are, in moving towards self knowledge and being evolution…
If you combine cosmopsychism and panpsychism you have minds (particles) within minds (universes). That might be how minds reproduce although it would probably be a very slow process taking billions or trillions of years for an electron to mature into a new universe.
An electron might only have free will over its train of thought in dreams for training and education purposes while its external behavior is controlled by the universe.
As the particle becomes a higher energy particle like dark matter it could be given more control internally and also some external control.
Eventually a highly favored high energy particle that passes all the tests the universe gives it can finally be rewarded by becoming a new universe like its parent.
A mind within a mind is an interesting abstraction, nevertheless, that model will not stand up under the scrutiny of analysis. This is precisely why idealism in all of its forms breaks down. Information processing or mind may indeed be a feature and/or intrinsic to the ontological primitive, but mind is not the underlying qualitative property as such. The ontological primitive is fundamentally simple, and due to its simplicity, the ontological primitive is elegantly beautiful; beyond belief…..
I don’t think that’s quite the same thing, though. A physical system’s parts may be able to instantiate minds, even if the whole instantiates a separate mind; but that doesn’t mean that we have a mind within a mind. Both minds there supervene on the physical, if perhaps in different ways, but a mind within a mind would be a mind that supervenes on the mental.
If you could show that this notion is incoherent, I think that would make for a rather strong argument against computationalist theories of mind. As SelfAwarePatterns notes, from the point of view of such a theory, a mind within a mind would not be any more difficult than a software-instantiated computer, i. e. a virtual machine. If the mind is nothing but computation, and we can perform mental computations, then implementing another mind that way is at least conceptually possible.
I think the following is an interesting exercise in that regard. Imagine a tree. What you hold within your mind is not, of course, a tree, but a thought having a tree as its intentional object. Perhaps a concept of a tree, or whatever; let’s denote that {tree}. Now, try to imagine the concept of a tree, i. e. {{tree}}. I think you can’t: whatever you come up with, will either collapse to {tree}, or be a concept of something other than a tree, e. g. {head with image of tree superimposed}. So if mentally instantiating a mind would need us to come up with something like {{tree}}, and if this always collapses to {tree} or {something else}, then I’d think that there can indeed be no minds within minds. Every part of this would need elaboration and defense, of course, but I think one might be able to come up with such an argument.
Any weird things you can think of, a philosopher has written a book 😉
http://philosophyofbrains.com/category/books/luke-roelofs-combining-minds
From the earlier thesis abstract
“`Combinationism’ – the thesis that intelligibly constitutive composition is possible in the
experiential realm bears on many debates in the metaphysics of mind. Constitutive panpsychism’s
need for combinationism is at the centre of recent criticism of the theory, but physicalists also need an account of how the consciousness, or lack thereof, in two cerebral hemispheres and a whole brain, or a human being and their head, or a social group and its individual members, can be intelligibly related. And further back in history, the supposed simplicity of the soul was held to rule out any form of materialism…
“…I show that …a weakened form of exclusivity still preserves the distinctive privacy of experience, and is compatible with a composite sharing the experiences of its parts. A second major problem concerns the unity, interdependence, or even holism often attributed to each subject’s experiential field…I develop a framework for accommodating and explaining this unity while still allowing component experiences to belong to distinct component subjects. Each experience in a unified field has a phenomenal character akin to that of amodal perception, indicating the other experiences that it is unified with.”
Along the same lines,
https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2019/03/are-we-in-midst-of-ongoing-moral.html
Danaher examines Evan Williams’ idea that not only are both cortical hemispheres conscious, but the
dominant hemispheres have been subjugating the (perhaps kinder, gentler) non-dominant hemispheres for the past million years 😉 Some may recall that Gene Wolfe wrote a novella around this topic.
Quantum entanglement between particles might be like temporary sharing of minds between particles. The universe might need to be permanently entangled with all its particles to maintain order and growth.
A universe entangled with it particles would be like a direct mind within a mind link — a big mind that can directly experience, communicate and read the mind of its smaller minds if it desires that.
The universe would need to be able to send dreams and experience the responses like a Vulcan mind meld to give appropriate feedback to the particle.
If a universe is controlling the external behavior of an electron then the only way the universe can interact with the the free will and consciousness of the electron would be a mind to mind entanglement.
Higher energy particles with more control over its external behavior could communicate optionally without mind entanglement.
Jochen (and everyone), don’t confuse a “mind within a mind” with “a human mind within a human mind”.
I wish everyone would make clear what they mean by “mind” before they discuss their comment.
And just in case anyone needed an example of a computer program within a computer program, there’s this cool video /a> showing the game of life implementing the game of life (cellular automata).
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[sigh] The cool video at this (randomly googled) webpage: https://jeremykun.com/2011/11/03/conways-game-of-life-in-conways-game-of-life/
I doubt most Christian/Muslim/Jewish philosophers of today would ascribe to Idealism. That seems more like something from the subcontinental areas, with a few heirs of Berkeley & a few Sufis being an exception?
I guess there is likely overlap, going back to ideas of an entity that holds patterns of nature in place.
On this question of minds within minds isn’t that Dissociative Identity Disorder? Or less extreme, the idea of multiple loci within a personality or driving a personality – even our learning is less a program installed and more the training of an organism. My learning to drive or cook subconsciously requires taming/training something within, or so it seems from introspection.
In trying to judge the concept of minds within Mind…I suspect we just don’t know enough about consciousness and its relation to the brain, let alone how to properly conceive of a Mind that is not just separate from brains but the maker of said brains.
And, of course, the brains we study are just like the atoms we detect – experiences within consciousness…
And also there is “Cosmological argument”…
…about casual within causal, within causal within, casual within place, within…
It is interesting, the effort to be here, seems to be the same, for my coming and going..
“A conscious mind is a process whose outputs are conditioned by the recognition of future and imagined entities”? But a conscious mind is not a continuous succession of events of recognition; though any particular event of recognition, having simultaneously both a “felt” and a cognitive component, seems to “embody” the very notion of a conscious experience…The trouble with some of our foremost theologians (e.g. David Bentley Hart) is not that they think that God is doing their thinking, but rather that they are thinking for God.
The existence of craniopagus twins shows that minds can overlap, at least, to greater or lesser extent, depending on the exactly configuration of the brain(s). Twins share some thoughts and perception. For example, one can recognize what the other is viewing without seeing it.
The idea of a super- and subordinate mind doesn’t really seem all that farfetched to me–for instance an encompassing mind aware, perhaps omniscient, of what goes on in a sub-mind, or a sub-mind either unaware of the surveillance or only dimly aware. It may turn out that all of these (and more) are possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craniopagus_twins#Tatiana_and_Krista
If computation generates minds then the point is made correctly. Just imagine : a recursive procedure could generate an infinite number of minds in microseconds ! All through the simple expedient of placing a memory address on the process stack. The amazing powers of virtual machines, when written about by people who don’t know what computers are ..
Or .. computation doesn’t make minds. End of.
Hi John Davey,
“Computation,” today, is abstracted away from physical properties. Any set of physics can represent a binary 1, or a zero, but only if you a specific interpretation mechanism to get the 1 from that particular set of physics. We, on the other hand, represent information, directly on causal physical qualities, like redness and greenness. Since there is no interpretation of physical redness required, this is more efficient. You need less abstracting hardware. For more information, see the emerging expert consensus (https://canonizer.com/topic/81-Mind-Experts/1) camp at Canonizer: Representational Qualia Theory (https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6).
Brent
Any set of physics can represent a binary 1, or a zero, but only if you a specific interpretation mechanism to get the 1 from that particular set of physics.
It’s arbitrary. It doesn’t “have” to be anything. I can make the rules what I like. Computation has never had “anything to do” with physical properties because computation has nothing to do with physics. Implementations of turing machines have used physical properties because – as a matter of engineering utility – they wouldn’t be much use if they weren’t.
We, on the other hand, represent information, directly on causal physical qualities, like redness and greenness.
Not so sure what the sentence means. Redness and Greeness are subjective mental experiences – they are caused, they don’t cause. And computational algorithms – being syntactical – wouldn’t understand them. So yes, the brain is absolutely hard tuned to the physical matter of the world around it (as evolution demands), but definitely no, not in any way or mode that includes computation. Computation and qualia are orthogonal.
JBD
Hi John,
Claims like: “Redness and Greenness are subjective mental experiences – they are caused, they don’t cause.” are falsifiable. If you really think you are justified with such bleating claims, you should “canonize” that view, to see if any other experts, or anyone, including you, for that matter, is willing to put their name behind such claims, by joining (or starting) a camp making such claims. As you can see, there is a near unanimous expert consensus (https://canonizer.com/topic/81-Mind-Experts/1) emerging that is predicting how your claims are about to be falsified, and for most already are, in the “Representational Qualia Theory” camp (https://canonizer.com/topic/88-Representational-Qualia/6).
Also, John.
Does not redness cause me to say “that is red”, when something is red?
Minds within minds is perfectly compatible with idealism. This idea is elaborated in writings by Seth from Jane Roberts. He gave many such explanations around the concept of “entity” in the book Seth Speaks, https://stormwolfwords.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/seth-speaks.pdf
See also his story of creation, http://settheory.net/seth-creation