I've given a moderate amount of thought to various topics that may, to some degree or another, be characterised as philosophical, or related to the nature of minds and intelligence. Here I have collected a few essays, of varying quality, on such topics:
There's been much discussion of artificial intelligence. In some sense I
see a creature's mind
as being, to the cellular tissues making up a
brain, what software is to the hardware of a computer. To see what it makes
sense to try to mean by intelligent
, in the context of computers, I think
in terms of my understanding of the intelligence of animals.
Even the lowly sea-slug has enough of a central nervous system that it can
be thought of as a brain: in principle, the state diagram
of that simple
system is an expression of the software
it is running. Like any analogue
computer, the hardware would have to change for the software to change: but the
principle is the same. After all, the hardware of a computer still has to
change state for its software to change. The software of A Cat, on the other
paw, is pretty damn sophisticated and highly optimised for the management,
deployment and enjoyment of one feline body: and, as with humans, much of that
software is learned from – configured by ? – their parents;
enough so that nature and nurture blurr into one another.