The Space of Possible Minds [1]

Aaron Sloman, the British philosopher, has this great phrase: the space of possible minds. The idea is that the space of possible minds encompasses not only the biological minds that have arisen on this earth, but also extraterrestrial intelligence, and whatever forms of biological or evolved intelligence are possible but have never occurred, and artificial intelligence in the whole range of possible ways we might build AI.

I love this idea of the space of possible minds, trying to understand the structure of the space of possible minds in some kind of principled way. How is consciousness distributed through this space of possible minds? Is something that has a sufficiently high level of intelligence necessarily conscious? Is consciousness a prerequisite for human-level intelligence or general intelligence? I tend to think the answer to that is no, but it needs to be fleshed out a little bit. We need to break down the concept of consciousness into different aspects, all of which tend to occur together in humans, but can occur independently, or some subset of these can occur on its own in an artificial intelligence. Maybe we can build an AI that clearly has an awareness and understanding of the world. We very much want to say, "It's conscious of its surroundings, but it doesn't experience any emotion and is not capable of suffering." We can imagine building something that has some aspects of consciousness and lacks others.

MURRAY SHANAHAN is a professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and a senior research scientist at DeepMind. Murray Shanahan's Edge Bio Page [2]