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…