Chapter 1: What Is Mind?

Edgar Morin suggests that our most advanced sciences not only, sooner or later, arrive at fundamental philosophical problems but that they actually renew them. Advances in knowledge within natural sciences continue to force us to reconsider what we believe about what constitutes reality. Likewise, cognitive sciences and advanced computation, especially their progeny artificial intelligence (AI), give us no choice but to ponder such questions as what is consciousness, what is the role of emotionality, and what constitutes intelligence, cognition, and problem-solving. One of the core philosophical questions surrounding the field of AI is whether a non-biologically constituted entity such as a computing device can be considered to have a mind and consciousness that give it an ability to produce mental states in exactly the same sense that humans and other living beings can. Theory of mind or our ability to attribute mental states, intents, desires, learnings, and knowledge to not only ourselves but to others leads us to assign those qualities to other observed and possibly unobservable agents and even mysterious forces, based on some frequently self-referential criteria. AI research is commonly defined as simply the study of “intelligent agents,” which can include any entity that can “perceive” its environment and take goal-directed actions to maximize its chances of successfully achieving its goals. The simplest intelligent agents to meet this definition are computer programs that are written to solve specific problems. Such simple agents belong to the historical realm that defined early computing and human–computer interaction. With rapidly increasing speed of computers, complexity of programming paradigms mixed with advances in neuroscience, we are faced with more profound philosophical questions which arise when we throw into the mix more complex agents, such as human beings and entire social systems. The moment we cross the line from human–computer interaction into mind augmentation based on the immersion of human cognition into advanced computation networks is an inflexion point at which the epistemological questions concerned with the nature and origin of knowledge are joined by ontological ones of: How do we group biologically and non-biologically based entities into basic categories, and what those categories might be. Our list of criteria of what constitutes artificial and natural intelligence is rapidly shrinking. As our “intelligent” machines become increasingly capable of performing tasks once considered to require human intelligence, such tasks tumble of that list one by one. This has led computer scientist Larry Tesler to, half-jokingly, refer to AI as anything that has not been done yet in the area of intelligence modeling. Complex tasks such as optical character recognition, natural language processing, self-driving cars, intelligent routing in content delivery networks, military simulations, strategic competition in games such as Go, or imperfect-information games such as poker are all becoming or have already become routine technologies. The questions framing future debates about power balance and justice that will guide and shape the development of mind augmentation all stem from the fundamental question whether humans and animals belong to the same category of “intelligent agents” as the machines that can for all intents and purposes perform the same or similar tasks more efficiently. Some computer and cognitive scientists are already convinced that the answer to that question is a resounding yes.