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The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens
Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human?
Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will?
Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.
Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will?
Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published January 23, 2022
123 people are currently reading
1344 people want to read
About the author
Philip Ball
64 books478 followersPhilip Ball (born 1962) is an English science writer. He holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University. He was an editor for the journal Nature for over 10 years. He now writes a regular column in Chemistry World. Ball's most-popular book is the 2004 Critical Mass: How One Things Leads to Another, winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. It examines a wide range of topics including the business cycle, random walks, phase transitions, bifurcation theory, traffic flow, Zipf's law, Small world phenomenon, catastrophe theory, the Prisoner's dilemma. The overall theme is one of applying modern mathematical models to social and economic phenomena.
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October 9, 2022The book starts of with an anecdote of Oliver Sacks pressing his face against the glass of an orangutan's enclosure in a zoo. The orangutan put down her baby, and pressed her face against his from her side of the glass. He put his hand on the glass, she covered it with her's and they looked at each other, really saw each other, and he, at least felt a great connection. Two minds meeting. He was elated and took it very seriously and the author thinks perhaps the orangutan was also seeing the identification between them.
In Fort Lauderdale recently I was in a car wash sitting outside, inside was a baby, maybe eighteen months old, if that. I squashed my nose to the glass, hoping to make the baby laugh. The baby pressed her's too. I put up my hand and she put up her little one, laughing. We played like this for a little while. It wasn't portentous, it was just fun. I wonder if the orangutan, not being a neurologist interested in the mind, had just not thought it was fun too?
The book gets into solipsism, Descartes, next. We know we exist but maybe nothing else on earth does, it's just us and everything else is a figment of our imagination. I think we've all been there. But, as philosophers say, it's a dead end. It might be, but we do it every night when we sleep, we concoct whole worlds that disappear when we wake. Maybe we are just sleeping all the time. Maybe the people in the film about Oliver Sacks, Awakenings who slept for decades, weren't frozen and 'dead to the world' but enjoying active lives in endless dreams?
In Fort Lauderdale recently I was in a car wash sitting outside, inside was a baby, maybe eighteen months old, if that. I squashed my nose to the glass, hoping to make the baby laugh. The baby pressed her's too. I put up my hand and she put up her little one, laughing. We played like this for a little while. It wasn't portentous, it was just fun. I wonder if the orangutan, not being a neurologist interested in the mind, had just not thought it was fun too?
The book gets into solipsism, Descartes, next. We know we exist but maybe nothing else on earth does, it's just us and everything else is a figment of our imagination. I think we've all been there. But, as philosophers say, it's a dead end. It might be, but we do it every night when we sleep, we concoct whole worlds that disappear when we wake. Maybe we are just sleeping all the time. Maybe the people in the film about Oliver Sacks, Awakenings who slept for decades, weren't frozen and 'dead to the world' but enjoying active lives in endless dreams?
June 27, 2022
It's fitting that this book on the nature of minds should be written by the most cerebral of the UK's professional science writers, Philip Ball. Like the uncertainty attached to the related concept of consciousness, exactly what a mind is, and what makes it a mind, is very difficult to pin down. Ball takes us effectively through some of the difficult definitions and unpacking involved to understand at least what researchers mean by 'mind', even if their work doesn't not necessarily enlighten us much.
A lot of the book is taken up with animals and to what extent they can be said to have minds. Ball bases his picture of a mind on a phrase that is reminiscent of Nagel's famous paper on being a bat. According to Ball, an organism can be said to have a mind if there is something that is what it is like to be that organism. (You may need to read that a couple of times.) At one end of the spectrum - apes, cetaceans, dogs, for instance - it's hard to believe that there are no minds involved, though few would probably argue that, say, a bacterium has one (some do).
A mechanism Ball uses is to consider 'Mindspace' - a conceptual multidimensional space with axes corresponding to the different factors that seem to go together to make up the idea of 'mind' - things like experience (meaning depth of feelings, rather than life encounters), agency (the ability to do things and exercise control while doing so), intelligence (whatever that means) and consciousness (ditto). It's an interesting approach, though ideally we need more than the page's two dimensions at a time - and even deciding where different entities fit in this space seems to involve a lot of guesswork. There's even a position given by some for dead people and God.
Unexpectedly, for me, the two most interesting parts of the book were not about the more predictable subject of animal minds, but rather about the potential for artificial intelligence and aliens to have minds. As Ball points out, it's almost impossible not to keep coming back to an anthropomorphic understanding - when, for instance, we think of the mind of an alien, it's very difficult not to give it a nature that is like what it feels like to be human, because our whole concept of 'mindedness' is based (inevitably) on human experience.
I enjoyed this book, and, as is always the case with Ball's writing, it stimulated me to think more about the topic. Even so, I found the book a touch over-long. This isn't helped by the sheer quantity of ideas about minds and their nature that seems to be unsupported by any good scientific evidence. At one point, Ball writes 'some researchers believe...' and this seemed to me to highlight the problem. Much of the discussion of minds isn't really science, but philosophy. It's what people believe to be the case (often holding wildly conflicting views) and there seems to be little chance for evidence to ever untangle the reality.
If we come down to the tag line of the book 'how to understand ourselves and other beings' (I'm aware the author doesn't always write this), it's a bit of a fail - a more accurate description would be 'how to understand that it's pretty much impossible to understand ourselves and other beings.' Despite this (and a couple of references to HAL 2000, which I can only assume was the younger cousin of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey), this is a worthwhile and interesting book, particularly where Ball does go beyond animal minds to explore the more exotic possibilities.
A lot of the book is taken up with animals and to what extent they can be said to have minds. Ball bases his picture of a mind on a phrase that is reminiscent of Nagel's famous paper on being a bat. According to Ball, an organism can be said to have a mind if there is something that is what it is like to be that organism. (You may need to read that a couple of times.) At one end of the spectrum - apes, cetaceans, dogs, for instance - it's hard to believe that there are no minds involved, though few would probably argue that, say, a bacterium has one (some do).
A mechanism Ball uses is to consider 'Mindspace' - a conceptual multidimensional space with axes corresponding to the different factors that seem to go together to make up the idea of 'mind' - things like experience (meaning depth of feelings, rather than life encounters), agency (the ability to do things and exercise control while doing so), intelligence (whatever that means) and consciousness (ditto). It's an interesting approach, though ideally we need more than the page's two dimensions at a time - and even deciding where different entities fit in this space seems to involve a lot of guesswork. There's even a position given by some for dead people and God.
Unexpectedly, for me, the two most interesting parts of the book were not about the more predictable subject of animal minds, but rather about the potential for artificial intelligence and aliens to have minds. As Ball points out, it's almost impossible not to keep coming back to an anthropomorphic understanding - when, for instance, we think of the mind of an alien, it's very difficult not to give it a nature that is like what it feels like to be human, because our whole concept of 'mindedness' is based (inevitably) on human experience.
I enjoyed this book, and, as is always the case with Ball's writing, it stimulated me to think more about the topic. Even so, I found the book a touch over-long. This isn't helped by the sheer quantity of ideas about minds and their nature that seems to be unsupported by any good scientific evidence. At one point, Ball writes 'some researchers believe...' and this seemed to me to highlight the problem. Much of the discussion of minds isn't really science, but philosophy. It's what people believe to be the case (often holding wildly conflicting views) and there seems to be little chance for evidence to ever untangle the reality.
If we come down to the tag line of the book 'how to understand ourselves and other beings' (I'm aware the author doesn't always write this), it's a bit of a fail - a more accurate description would be 'how to understand that it's pretty much impossible to understand ourselves and other beings.' Despite this (and a couple of references to HAL 2000, which I can only assume was the younger cousin of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey), this is a worthwhile and interesting book, particularly where Ball does go beyond animal minds to explore the more exotic possibilities.
June 30, 2022
It was an very interesting audiobook that I learned quite a bit from. But as an audiobook it wasn't very "readable". Had to really try and focus and didn't feel that I had a "listening flow" with this one. Where I could relax and just listen to what was being said. But the information was very good.
August 12, 2022
I feel as if I should be writing an intelligent and informative review of this weighty book. But my thoughts about it keep trickling out of my head.
One of the reasons is that it's extremely wide-ranging – even more so than the subtitle suggests.
Ball's erudition is impressive, and I've loved other books of his – his biography of Paracelsus (The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science) is superb.
But he roams so far and wide here, and my own reason for reading it was so specific, it was probably inevitable that I would be fascinated by some parts but slightly bored by others.
Animal cognition? I can't get enough of it. AI learning? Not so much. The chapter on aliens felt more entertaining than substantial, and the stuff on the philosophy of free will bordered on choresome. (No doubt some other readers will feel exactly the opposite.)
In a nutshell, if you're interested in any aspect of consciousness, intelligence or the philosophy of mind, you'll find a lot here that's up your alley. But unless you're interested in every aspect of those questions, there'll be times when you're tempted to skim.
One of the reasons is that it's extremely wide-ranging – even more so than the subtitle suggests.
Ball's erudition is impressive, and I've loved other books of his – his biography of Paracelsus (The Devil's Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science) is superb.
But he roams so far and wide here, and my own reason for reading it was so specific, it was probably inevitable that I would be fascinated by some parts but slightly bored by others.
Animal cognition? I can't get enough of it. AI learning? Not so much. The chapter on aliens felt more entertaining than substantial, and the stuff on the philosophy of free will bordered on choresome. (No doubt some other readers will feel exactly the opposite.)
In a nutshell, if you're interested in any aspect of consciousness, intelligence or the philosophy of mind, you'll find a lot here that's up your alley. But unless you're interested in every aspect of those questions, there'll be times when you're tempted to skim.
Read
August 17, 2022My interview with Philip Ball on "The Book of Minds" for The Armen Show:
357: Philip Ball - "The Book of Minds"
357: Philip Ball - "The Book of Minds"
July 1, 2023
Comprehensive, interesting, well written, and ends with the question of free will.
June 11, 2023
An interesting book that provides a great deal of food for thought. Philip Ball has provided a broad overview of the current state about minds and consciousness. Of course, since the definition of consciousness and intelligence and other such terms is ambiguous, this book ends up being a compilation of multiple disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, biology, neuroscience, and robotics. Free Will and Artificial Intelligence is also examined, so are aliens and how they think and if we would actually recognize cognition in a creature that wasn't human. This is a complex subject that is hard to pin down. I enjoyed reading the book.
June 1, 2025
0.75/5⭐️
This book is awfully long only to give the ultimatum that "there is so much to know and we will most likely never know". Sure I learned a lot of new concepts, words, and trends, but this book literally drained the energy out of me. I wanted to learn something of value. I only endured the awful experience of reading this book because I have bought it and couldn't DNF for the life of me. Ugh. I will never read non-fiction again.
This book is awfully long only to give the ultimatum that "there is so much to know and we will most likely never know". Sure I learned a lot of new concepts, words, and trends, but this book literally drained the energy out of me. I wanted to learn something of value. I only endured the awful experience of reading this book because I have bought it and couldn't DNF for the life of me. Ugh. I will never read non-fiction again.
January 5, 2024
I found this a very challenging read and could only read maybe a chapter at a time and then needed to have time to let that sink in and think about it. The author certainly challenges some of our ideas of "Mind" but in the end I didn't think I was any further ahead in trying to distinguish mind from consciousness.
December 5, 2022
When I first read Immanuel Kant, I was most struck with his reasoned conclusion that we could not perceive and understand the world if not for the fact that our minds were created in such a way as to perceive our reality in certain categories. When I read Stanislau Lem, I came away realizing that the way in which we divide up the world in our thinking may be unique to humans and, should we meet aliens from other worlds someday, it may well be that they perceive, act, and think very differently from us, so differently, that we may have no way of understanding each other.
In Philip Ball’s wonderful book, The Book of Minds, I found a convincing argument that even among our fellow inhabitants of our planet, it’s not likely that we know how other species think or perceive, and, as we increasingly produce more and more powerful artificial intelligences, it may also be true that we will not know how they think. Now, all these things are important considerations for someone such as me, who writes science fiction, particularly science fiction that includes both artificial intelligences and aliens from other worlds. But, although I purchased and began reading Ball’s book hoping to gain ideas for my novels, I soon became entranced by the subject matter itself and the questions it raised.
Ball uses a concept that he calls “mindedness,” which is basically what it’s like to be something as a way of defining mind, i.e., “For an entity to have a mind, there must be something that it is like to be that entity.” It is mind, he says, that hosts an experience of some sort. Entities can possess different degrees of mindedness. Is mindedness the same as consciousness? He says not, but instead suggests that “mindedness is a disposition of cognitive systems that can potentially give rise to states of consciousness.”
Ball’s definitions are less important than his examples. When he begins to examine how other creatures differ from humans, he finds that they have different sensitivities, different innate cognitive systems, than we do. Sea creatures, those that fly, and night creatures, live in different worlds than we do, because they have different minds. Ball proposes that it doesn’t make sense to evaluate other creatures’ minds in terms of how they match up to human minds. Concepts of human intelligence don’t apply to creatures that can exceed human abilities to navigate by landmarks of smell or color or by magnetic directions, or by bouncing sound off objects. They are too different. Ball shows that our standard view of other creatures as beings that are locked into rigid programmed interactions with their environment underestimates the flexibility of, for instance, bees, who have remarkable direction-finding skills that allow them to alter their method of finding their way back to the hive, based on circumstances. Other creatures, such as corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish, possess “nerve nets” that propagate sensory signals from one part of them to another, so that they experience an “overall sensation, a unified internal representation of the organism’s situation.” These are not human-like skills or experiences, and Ball opts to create what he calls a “mindspace.” Rather than a scale on which to compare minds across the same traits or measures, he recommends locating different skills and abilities and properties in a sort of matrix in which each of them represents an axis. Humans might rank low or even nonexistent on using magnetic poles for orientation, or feeling integrated, unlocalized sensory experiences, while being high on extrapolating from one experience to another.
Ball cautions us not to assume that we are born into the world possessing a high-powered learning machine for a brain but one that is otherwise blank of knowledge. Evolution has been kinder to us than that. Just like other creatures, we have a lot built-in. He cites the work of Harvard psychologist, Elizabeth Spelke, showing that humans possess, at birth, a set of “core knowledge” systems, each of which work independently of one another and which allow us to process experience in a way that enhances our adaptiveness. Spelke has identified systems that allow us to conceptualize objects, to understand distance and orientation, to think in terms of number and quantity, to understand causality and see things in action-agent sequences, and to see others as agents with intentions and goals. These and other to-yet-be-identified innate cognitive systems have much to do with how our human minds experience the world, and to what extent other creatures have similar systems and experience the world similarly to us is an open question.
The innate characteristics of our mindedness, which shape how we learn, how we remember, and how we think, are extremely important, but they are qualities that those who create artificial intelligences have mostly ignored. Designers of AI have, at best, equipped their devices with just one or two of these traits, such as the ability to learn by reinforcement, or to scan edges of objects, but otherwise have devised AIs that are tabula rasas. Perhaps the field has an aversion to returning to the era of “expert systems,” in which their AI systems were loaded with both data and algorithms that were thought to match what human experts used to solve problems or make decisions. Since such data were highly situation-specific, it was hard to advance from such a system to an all-purpose AI that could learn across content areas. But the knowledge built into human minds is not high-level details it is basic ways to think about the sensory data being received and the kinds of motor outputs it provokes. The neural interactions behind it might be complex, but the way it affects the mind is simple, making it ready to support learning in a variety of situations. With humans, unlike most AIs, the cognitive processes we use were designed to work within human bodies and they are intimately tied to our bilateral sensory and motor systems, and, since we left the trees, our upright posture and locomotion, not to mention our sexual reproduction and group living situation. Ball cites neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s observation that, “If the representations of the world that a mind produces were not designed for an organism in a body (and specifically this type of body) ... the mind would surely be different from ours.”
Ball does address the question of whether AIs can have minds, and if so, what they might be like. After initial attempts to define both thinking and computation in terms of computational symbol manipulation and programming computers to think like humans, which was wrong at least on the human side, the field turned to teaching computers to learn and then providing them with tons of information and asking them to use that information and learning ability to create responses. The results have been impressive, especially in areas such as natural language learning, and image identification, but, at least to date, even the most successful systems don’t seem to exhibit the kind of “common sense” that would indicate that they know what they’re doing, as opposed to operating, well, mindlessly. But what did we expect, that creating a computer that could mimic human responses without being specifically taught how to do it would produce a wise mind as well? As Ball points out, the human mind just has too much information pre-loaded into it and it works along pathways that themselves were shaped by evolution. Its final goal is to enhance the survivability of its possessor. That has not been true of AIs, except in science fiction (e.g., my science fiction). A final note is that, currently, some of those designing AI, such as DARPA (the villain in Ezekiel’s Brain), in their “project common sense” are employing child psychologists, because, Ball quotes psychologist Tomer Ullman as saying, “The questions people are asking in child development are very much those people are asking in AI. What is the state of knowledge that we start with, how do we get more, what’s the learning algorithm?”
So far, AIs don’t possess human-like minds, but do they possess their own types of minds? And, if not, will they some day? Could they? Ball is not sure about this. He says, “we may be best advised to grant them a kind of provisional mindedness.” He recommends studying what AIs do and how they do it (although this is sometimes obscure), in what he calls a “behavioral science of machines.” A main reason we need this is that, as we ask machines to do more and more, it could be dangerous to not know how we can expect them to act. Something on which Ball and I agree, is that, if machines are ever to become conscious (I think they will, and he is more dubious), we would need to program in the consciousness. It would not arise spontaneously on its own as an emergent property. That would mean identifying what the elements of consciousness are, at least as it exists in humans. In both I, Carlos and Ezekiel’s Brain I have identified some elements of consciousness, such as structuring experiences that involve the self in agent-action terms and embedding it in a goal-oriented narrative, plus some kind of feedback mechanism that creates the experience of observing one’s own thoughts, sensations, and actions within this narrative. As Ball points out, no one is attempting to do this at the moment.
Finally, we have the case of aliens from space. Ball takes the topic seriously enough to devote a chapter to it. He first points out that most science fiction stories create aliens who., regardless of their physical characteristics, behave and think like humans. Even our scientific projects, such as SETI and the old Project Blue Book assumed that aliens would want to communicate to other races on other planets and that they would develop advanced versions of similar technology to ours. In fact, there is no reason to believe either of these is true, but if either is not, it will make our task more difficult unless we establish an ability to visit other star systems.
For the sake of simplicity Ball takes for granted that “the laws of physics and chemistry are universal.” He also assumes that “Darwinian evolution by natural selection is the only viable way for complex organisms to arise from simple origins,” so whatever alien organisms are like, they will have been shaped to adapt to their environment. There may also be constraints to how far such adaptation can go. Flying creatures may need wings and sea creatures must have streamlined bodies that allow them to swim. On Earth, convergent evolution produced similar adaptations across different species, e.g., fish, whales and dolphins have similar bodies; eyes developed similarly across several species that have little else in common. This is because there are a limited number of solutions to certain environmental problems. But, as Ball points out, this is all speculation. Lamarckian evolution that passes on adaptations that are made within the lifetime of an organism is not impossible. Environments on alien planets may differ much more than we have seen on Earth. What about planets whose entire surfaces are water. Would fish learn to communicate at least as much as whales and dolphins? Could a species exist only in the atmosphere? We have no idea, really, and, if Earth’s environment and our need to adapt to it is what shaped our minds, then alien minds might be very different from ours, indeed.
The Book of Minds, contains a great deal of food for thought, and is filled with interesting facts across a wide range of disciplines (biology, psychology, computer science). I was amazed how much an author can know about different subjects. The writing is lively and contains a fair amount of humor. Some areas of philosophy I thought were too brief and superficial to be useful (what is free will, for instance), but otherwise it is a fascinating book and one that gave me some humility regarding identifying the human mind as something special and a model for all other successful minds. That’s not the case. I came away with my interest in the minds of AIs, (if their minds exist) and the minds of aliens (if aliens exist) renewed and heightened. I think it will enhance my science fiction writing.
In Philip Ball’s wonderful book, The Book of Minds, I found a convincing argument that even among our fellow inhabitants of our planet, it’s not likely that we know how other species think or perceive, and, as we increasingly produce more and more powerful artificial intelligences, it may also be true that we will not know how they think. Now, all these things are important considerations for someone such as me, who writes science fiction, particularly science fiction that includes both artificial intelligences and aliens from other worlds. But, although I purchased and began reading Ball’s book hoping to gain ideas for my novels, I soon became entranced by the subject matter itself and the questions it raised.
Ball uses a concept that he calls “mindedness,” which is basically what it’s like to be something as a way of defining mind, i.e., “For an entity to have a mind, there must be something that it is like to be that entity.” It is mind, he says, that hosts an experience of some sort. Entities can possess different degrees of mindedness. Is mindedness the same as consciousness? He says not, but instead suggests that “mindedness is a disposition of cognitive systems that can potentially give rise to states of consciousness.”
Ball’s definitions are less important than his examples. When he begins to examine how other creatures differ from humans, he finds that they have different sensitivities, different innate cognitive systems, than we do. Sea creatures, those that fly, and night creatures, live in different worlds than we do, because they have different minds. Ball proposes that it doesn’t make sense to evaluate other creatures’ minds in terms of how they match up to human minds. Concepts of human intelligence don’t apply to creatures that can exceed human abilities to navigate by landmarks of smell or color or by magnetic directions, or by bouncing sound off objects. They are too different. Ball shows that our standard view of other creatures as beings that are locked into rigid programmed interactions with their environment underestimates the flexibility of, for instance, bees, who have remarkable direction-finding skills that allow them to alter their method of finding their way back to the hive, based on circumstances. Other creatures, such as corals, sea anemones, and jellyfish, possess “nerve nets” that propagate sensory signals from one part of them to another, so that they experience an “overall sensation, a unified internal representation of the organism’s situation.” These are not human-like skills or experiences, and Ball opts to create what he calls a “mindspace.” Rather than a scale on which to compare minds across the same traits or measures, he recommends locating different skills and abilities and properties in a sort of matrix in which each of them represents an axis. Humans might rank low or even nonexistent on using magnetic poles for orientation, or feeling integrated, unlocalized sensory experiences, while being high on extrapolating from one experience to another.
Ball cautions us not to assume that we are born into the world possessing a high-powered learning machine for a brain but one that is otherwise blank of knowledge. Evolution has been kinder to us than that. Just like other creatures, we have a lot built-in. He cites the work of Harvard psychologist, Elizabeth Spelke, showing that humans possess, at birth, a set of “core knowledge” systems, each of which work independently of one another and which allow us to process experience in a way that enhances our adaptiveness. Spelke has identified systems that allow us to conceptualize objects, to understand distance and orientation, to think in terms of number and quantity, to understand causality and see things in action-agent sequences, and to see others as agents with intentions and goals. These and other to-yet-be-identified innate cognitive systems have much to do with how our human minds experience the world, and to what extent other creatures have similar systems and experience the world similarly to us is an open question.
The innate characteristics of our mindedness, which shape how we learn, how we remember, and how we think, are extremely important, but they are qualities that those who create artificial intelligences have mostly ignored. Designers of AI have, at best, equipped their devices with just one or two of these traits, such as the ability to learn by reinforcement, or to scan edges of objects, but otherwise have devised AIs that are tabula rasas. Perhaps the field has an aversion to returning to the era of “expert systems,” in which their AI systems were loaded with both data and algorithms that were thought to match what human experts used to solve problems or make decisions. Since such data were highly situation-specific, it was hard to advance from such a system to an all-purpose AI that could learn across content areas. But the knowledge built into human minds is not high-level details it is basic ways to think about the sensory data being received and the kinds of motor outputs it provokes. The neural interactions behind it might be complex, but the way it affects the mind is simple, making it ready to support learning in a variety of situations. With humans, unlike most AIs, the cognitive processes we use were designed to work within human bodies and they are intimately tied to our bilateral sensory and motor systems, and, since we left the trees, our upright posture and locomotion, not to mention our sexual reproduction and group living situation. Ball cites neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s observation that, “If the representations of the world that a mind produces were not designed for an organism in a body (and specifically this type of body) ... the mind would surely be different from ours.”
Ball does address the question of whether AIs can have minds, and if so, what they might be like. After initial attempts to define both thinking and computation in terms of computational symbol manipulation and programming computers to think like humans, which was wrong at least on the human side, the field turned to teaching computers to learn and then providing them with tons of information and asking them to use that information and learning ability to create responses. The results have been impressive, especially in areas such as natural language learning, and image identification, but, at least to date, even the most successful systems don’t seem to exhibit the kind of “common sense” that would indicate that they know what they’re doing, as opposed to operating, well, mindlessly. But what did we expect, that creating a computer that could mimic human responses without being specifically taught how to do it would produce a wise mind as well? As Ball points out, the human mind just has too much information pre-loaded into it and it works along pathways that themselves were shaped by evolution. Its final goal is to enhance the survivability of its possessor. That has not been true of AIs, except in science fiction (e.g., my science fiction). A final note is that, currently, some of those designing AI, such as DARPA (the villain in Ezekiel’s Brain), in their “project common sense” are employing child psychologists, because, Ball quotes psychologist Tomer Ullman as saying, “The questions people are asking in child development are very much those people are asking in AI. What is the state of knowledge that we start with, how do we get more, what’s the learning algorithm?”
So far, AIs don’t possess human-like minds, but do they possess their own types of minds? And, if not, will they some day? Could they? Ball is not sure about this. He says, “we may be best advised to grant them a kind of provisional mindedness.” He recommends studying what AIs do and how they do it (although this is sometimes obscure), in what he calls a “behavioral science of machines.” A main reason we need this is that, as we ask machines to do more and more, it could be dangerous to not know how we can expect them to act. Something on which Ball and I agree, is that, if machines are ever to become conscious (I think they will, and he is more dubious), we would need to program in the consciousness. It would not arise spontaneously on its own as an emergent property. That would mean identifying what the elements of consciousness are, at least as it exists in humans. In both I, Carlos and Ezekiel’s Brain I have identified some elements of consciousness, such as structuring experiences that involve the self in agent-action terms and embedding it in a goal-oriented narrative, plus some kind of feedback mechanism that creates the experience of observing one’s own thoughts, sensations, and actions within this narrative. As Ball points out, no one is attempting to do this at the moment.
Finally, we have the case of aliens from space. Ball takes the topic seriously enough to devote a chapter to it. He first points out that most science fiction stories create aliens who., regardless of their physical characteristics, behave and think like humans. Even our scientific projects, such as SETI and the old Project Blue Book assumed that aliens would want to communicate to other races on other planets and that they would develop advanced versions of similar technology to ours. In fact, there is no reason to believe either of these is true, but if either is not, it will make our task more difficult unless we establish an ability to visit other star systems.
For the sake of simplicity Ball takes for granted that “the laws of physics and chemistry are universal.” He also assumes that “Darwinian evolution by natural selection is the only viable way for complex organisms to arise from simple origins,” so whatever alien organisms are like, they will have been shaped to adapt to their environment. There may also be constraints to how far such adaptation can go. Flying creatures may need wings and sea creatures must have streamlined bodies that allow them to swim. On Earth, convergent evolution produced similar adaptations across different species, e.g., fish, whales and dolphins have similar bodies; eyes developed similarly across several species that have little else in common. This is because there are a limited number of solutions to certain environmental problems. But, as Ball points out, this is all speculation. Lamarckian evolution that passes on adaptations that are made within the lifetime of an organism is not impossible. Environments on alien planets may differ much more than we have seen on Earth. What about planets whose entire surfaces are water. Would fish learn to communicate at least as much as whales and dolphins? Could a species exist only in the atmosphere? We have no idea, really, and, if Earth’s environment and our need to adapt to it is what shaped our minds, then alien minds might be very different from ours, indeed.
The Book of Minds, contains a great deal of food for thought, and is filled with interesting facts across a wide range of disciplines (biology, psychology, computer science). I was amazed how much an author can know about different subjects. The writing is lively and contains a fair amount of humor. Some areas of philosophy I thought were too brief and superficial to be useful (what is free will, for instance), but otherwise it is a fascinating book and one that gave me some humility regarding identifying the human mind as something special and a model for all other successful minds. That’s not the case. I came away with my interest in the minds of AIs, (if their minds exist) and the minds of aliens (if aliens exist) renewed and heightened. I think it will enhance my science fiction writing.
February 5, 2025
This is the second Philip Ball book I have read in the past few months and I will now proceed to read everything he has written. I’m hooked. There is a continuous thread of complexity theory through his work. In every attempt to describe both nature and behavior he reminds his readers of course graining and to deviate from looking for causation in bottom up theories.
August 17, 2024
Since ancient Greece, the mind has been a captivating subject of contemplation and philosophical inquiry. Recent years have seen renewed interest in this topic, driven by two significant developments. First, advances in neurobiology offer new hope that the mind can be understood through molecular and neural mechanisms, much like a watch is through its mechanical parts. Second, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) challenges the uniqueness of the human mind. Is the mind simply the sum of neuronal activities? Can it be separated from its biological foundation and operate on a silicon-based computer? These questions are both philosophically profound and practically urgent.
“The Book of Minds” by science writer Philip Ball, published in 2022, contributes to this ongoing conversation. Rather than providing definitive answers, the book aims to establish a framework for exploring and debating them. It surveys a wide range of current neurological and philosophical studies and introduces the author’s own thought experiments to enrich the discussion. Its main contributions lie in clarifying the various types and levels of mind functions and demonstrating a methodology for studying the mind by extending the concept beyond humans.
A major challenge is the absence of a clear definition of what “mind” actually means. The author anchors his discussion on the concept of “mind space,” which encompasses a diverse array of minds, each evaluated according to multiple functionality metrics. This “mind space” can be imagined as a multi-dimensional mathematical space where each type of mind—human, machine, whale, dog, etc.—is positioned according to its level of functionality. For instance, dogs excel in olfaction compared to humans, while monkeys do not possess the same level of reasoning ability as humans. While the concept of “mind space” is not new, there is no consensus on its coordinates, or the metrics used to measure the various capacities of the mind. After an extensive review of previous work, the author suggests that three primary functionalities—perception, awareness, and reasoning—along with agency, are the key coordinates.
Perception is the ability to synthesize sensory information to create a mental representation of the external world. For example, one might construct a landscape map by combining views obtained while walking through a field. A mental model of the world allows us to fill in sensory gaps and filter sensory input based on our current focus.
Awareness, or self-awareness, is the knowledge of oneself in relation to the external world. This includes the physical body, which has a unique relationship with the mind, as well as the experiences and values that mentally define the identity of the “self.” A common self-awareness test is the mirror test, which assesses whether an animal can recognize the connection between its body and the reflection. However, self-awareness extends far beyond such behavioral traits; it is an operational mode of the brain that maintains a stable identity despite changing circumstances. One’s behaviors and choices are not merely reactions to sensory inputs but are reflections of personal priorities, values, and emotional states. Self-awareness is central to consciousness, although the latter lacks a universally accepted definition.
Reasoning is the ability to “understand” the environment rather than simply react to it like an automaton. Reasoning distills past experiences to model how the external world operates, allowing the entity to optimize its reactions even in unfamiliar situations. The goal of reasoning may transcend practical concerns. For example, humans engage in reasoning for self-fulfillment, often detached from or intentionally excluding sensory inputs. For humans, the building blocks of reasoning are abstraction (a hierarchical structure for concepts) and formal logic. However, other valid forms of reasoning may also exist.
Perhaps the crown jewel of the mind is agency, or free will—the ability to choose among multiple options in a given situation. The existence of free will is difficult to verify empirically, yet it remains the way we understand human behavior and organize society. Free will may be the only way we know to model a complex system like humanity. If an AI system were as sophisticated as a human, we might also model it as having free will and personality. By viewing free will as a modeling tool, the author sidesteps the ongoing philosophical debate and offers a practical strategy.
After outlining these performance metrics, the author explores various entities that might possess a mind and situates them within the mind space. A bee, for example, has a mind because it appears to maintain a spatial map of its surroundings. A crow has a mind because it can use tools creatively, demonstrating some reasoning ability. Aliens might possess very different minds, and we should strive to imagine them. Do machines have minds? Probably not today’s machines, which are limited to logical operations. However, as machines become more complex in scale and structure, perhaps a mind will eventually emerge. Do animals have consciousness? When hurt, do they react instinctively to danger, or do they experience “pain” and “sadness”? Finally, there may be collective minds, at least among humans. A group of cooperating people might achieve mind capacities qualitatively higher than any individual's.
The mental exercise of examining and imagining different types of minds within the context of “mind space” is valuable. It encourages us to broaden our conception of the mind and refine our understanding. When comparing human and animal minds, we see that mind capacities, whether perception or agency, exist on a continuum across the animal kingdom. However, humans stand out for their overall excellence. While other animals excel in specific capabilities, humans are adept in many situations, both within and beyond their everyday living environments. Humans are particularly skilled at handling novel situations that go beyond what evolution has “trained” them for. Moreover, humans transcend mere survival, applying their minds to other pursuits in search of “meaning.” When we contemplate alien minds, our imagination stretches to consider how a mind could be orders of magnitude stronger than ours or shaped by an environment with different dimensions of space and time. This raises an intriguing question: how can we comprehend the fundamental limitations of our minds and imagine a world beyond them?
Exploring the minds of AI systems is both practically necessary and philosophically intriguing. What is the relationship between functionality and the presence of a mind? Can an advanced AI system be highly functional and intelligent without possessing a mind? If so, would we prefer it that way so AI systems remain under human control? Conversely, could an AI system develop a mind, even free will? If so, this might suggest that the mind can be separated from our biological bodies, potentially bringing new meaning to Descartes’s dualism.
“The Book of Minds” is an encyclopedic survey of contemporary thought on minds and consciousness. While it juxtaposes and contrasts various opinions on specific issues, it does not systematically trace individual thinkers’ ideas. Readers may benefit more from the book if they are familiar with some prominent thinkers in the field before diving in. One heavily referenced thinker in the book is Daniel Dennett, whose work “Elbow Room” offers a fascinating exploration of consciousness and free will.
In “The Book of Minds,” the author maintains an open mind. With highly eclectic skills, he glides among multiple perspectives and positions, embracing controversies and uncertainties. He also revisits the same topics from different angles and in different contexts. This approach makes the book enjoyable but challenging to follow. Picking any random page, it might be difficult to recall what came before and after. The titles and subtitles are sparse and not particularly informative. Perhaps multiple readings could reveal the book’s underlying structure if a reader is inclined to a deeper exploration.
Discussions about the mind are both simple and complex. The topic has a low barrier to entry because anyone can start contemplating the mind through introspection. At the same time, it is challenging because it is the only case where we attempt to understand something as complex as the brain we use to analyze it. Philip Ball's approach is both ambitious and thought-provoking, inviting readers to engage with complex questions about the nature of minds, consciousness, and the implications of artificial intelligence. While the book's structure and dense content may present challenges, particularly for those unfamiliar with the field, its broad survey of ideas and its audacious framework make this book a rewarding read for those willing to delve deeply into the subject. For readers interested in the intersection of philosophy, neuroscience, and AI, "The Book of Minds" offers a rich and expansive journey through the many dimensions of what it means to have a mind.
“The Book of Minds” by science writer Philip Ball, published in 2022, contributes to this ongoing conversation. Rather than providing definitive answers, the book aims to establish a framework for exploring and debating them. It surveys a wide range of current neurological and philosophical studies and introduces the author’s own thought experiments to enrich the discussion. Its main contributions lie in clarifying the various types and levels of mind functions and demonstrating a methodology for studying the mind by extending the concept beyond humans.
A major challenge is the absence of a clear definition of what “mind” actually means. The author anchors his discussion on the concept of “mind space,” which encompasses a diverse array of minds, each evaluated according to multiple functionality metrics. This “mind space” can be imagined as a multi-dimensional mathematical space where each type of mind—human, machine, whale, dog, etc.—is positioned according to its level of functionality. For instance, dogs excel in olfaction compared to humans, while monkeys do not possess the same level of reasoning ability as humans. While the concept of “mind space” is not new, there is no consensus on its coordinates, or the metrics used to measure the various capacities of the mind. After an extensive review of previous work, the author suggests that three primary functionalities—perception, awareness, and reasoning—along with agency, are the key coordinates.
Perception is the ability to synthesize sensory information to create a mental representation of the external world. For example, one might construct a landscape map by combining views obtained while walking through a field. A mental model of the world allows us to fill in sensory gaps and filter sensory input based on our current focus.
Awareness, or self-awareness, is the knowledge of oneself in relation to the external world. This includes the physical body, which has a unique relationship with the mind, as well as the experiences and values that mentally define the identity of the “self.” A common self-awareness test is the mirror test, which assesses whether an animal can recognize the connection between its body and the reflection. However, self-awareness extends far beyond such behavioral traits; it is an operational mode of the brain that maintains a stable identity despite changing circumstances. One’s behaviors and choices are not merely reactions to sensory inputs but are reflections of personal priorities, values, and emotional states. Self-awareness is central to consciousness, although the latter lacks a universally accepted definition.
Reasoning is the ability to “understand” the environment rather than simply react to it like an automaton. Reasoning distills past experiences to model how the external world operates, allowing the entity to optimize its reactions even in unfamiliar situations. The goal of reasoning may transcend practical concerns. For example, humans engage in reasoning for self-fulfillment, often detached from or intentionally excluding sensory inputs. For humans, the building blocks of reasoning are abstraction (a hierarchical structure for concepts) and formal logic. However, other valid forms of reasoning may also exist.
Perhaps the crown jewel of the mind is agency, or free will—the ability to choose among multiple options in a given situation. The existence of free will is difficult to verify empirically, yet it remains the way we understand human behavior and organize society. Free will may be the only way we know to model a complex system like humanity. If an AI system were as sophisticated as a human, we might also model it as having free will and personality. By viewing free will as a modeling tool, the author sidesteps the ongoing philosophical debate and offers a practical strategy.
After outlining these performance metrics, the author explores various entities that might possess a mind and situates them within the mind space. A bee, for example, has a mind because it appears to maintain a spatial map of its surroundings. A crow has a mind because it can use tools creatively, demonstrating some reasoning ability. Aliens might possess very different minds, and we should strive to imagine them. Do machines have minds? Probably not today’s machines, which are limited to logical operations. However, as machines become more complex in scale and structure, perhaps a mind will eventually emerge. Do animals have consciousness? When hurt, do they react instinctively to danger, or do they experience “pain” and “sadness”? Finally, there may be collective minds, at least among humans. A group of cooperating people might achieve mind capacities qualitatively higher than any individual's.
The mental exercise of examining and imagining different types of minds within the context of “mind space” is valuable. It encourages us to broaden our conception of the mind and refine our understanding. When comparing human and animal minds, we see that mind capacities, whether perception or agency, exist on a continuum across the animal kingdom. However, humans stand out for their overall excellence. While other animals excel in specific capabilities, humans are adept in many situations, both within and beyond their everyday living environments. Humans are particularly skilled at handling novel situations that go beyond what evolution has “trained” them for. Moreover, humans transcend mere survival, applying their minds to other pursuits in search of “meaning.” When we contemplate alien minds, our imagination stretches to consider how a mind could be orders of magnitude stronger than ours or shaped by an environment with different dimensions of space and time. This raises an intriguing question: how can we comprehend the fundamental limitations of our minds and imagine a world beyond them?
Exploring the minds of AI systems is both practically necessary and philosophically intriguing. What is the relationship between functionality and the presence of a mind? Can an advanced AI system be highly functional and intelligent without possessing a mind? If so, would we prefer it that way so AI systems remain under human control? Conversely, could an AI system develop a mind, even free will? If so, this might suggest that the mind can be separated from our biological bodies, potentially bringing new meaning to Descartes’s dualism.
“The Book of Minds” is an encyclopedic survey of contemporary thought on minds and consciousness. While it juxtaposes and contrasts various opinions on specific issues, it does not systematically trace individual thinkers’ ideas. Readers may benefit more from the book if they are familiar with some prominent thinkers in the field before diving in. One heavily referenced thinker in the book is Daniel Dennett, whose work “Elbow Room” offers a fascinating exploration of consciousness and free will.
In “The Book of Minds,” the author maintains an open mind. With highly eclectic skills, he glides among multiple perspectives and positions, embracing controversies and uncertainties. He also revisits the same topics from different angles and in different contexts. This approach makes the book enjoyable but challenging to follow. Picking any random page, it might be difficult to recall what came before and after. The titles and subtitles are sparse and not particularly informative. Perhaps multiple readings could reveal the book’s underlying structure if a reader is inclined to a deeper exploration.
Discussions about the mind are both simple and complex. The topic has a low barrier to entry because anyone can start contemplating the mind through introspection. At the same time, it is challenging because it is the only case where we attempt to understand something as complex as the brain we use to analyze it. Philip Ball's approach is both ambitious and thought-provoking, inviting readers to engage with complex questions about the nature of minds, consciousness, and the implications of artificial intelligence. While the book's structure and dense content may present challenges, particularly for those unfamiliar with the field, its broad survey of ideas and its audacious framework make this book a rewarding read for those willing to delve deeply into the subject. For readers interested in the intersection of philosophy, neuroscience, and AI, "The Book of Minds" offers a rich and expansive journey through the many dimensions of what it means to have a mind.
May 14, 2023
The book of minds
Philip Ball
‘The book of minds’ was the first non-fiction book I picked up this year after a heady dose of science fiction reads over the last months, a list that included some great new books and some that were just re-reads (please feel free to reach out for some great recommendations!). For many of you who reached out to comment on my LinkedIn review silence, it was not intentional, just happenstance in that I landed on a string of great science fiction reads and chose not to break a good run. Meanwhile it has been a period of extraordinary activity in my life and more importantly in topics core to my professional life. AI and ML are in the midst of prolific and unprecedented action, the likes of which I have not seen in the near 3 decades of my career in the space. The book pick was not random but deliberate as you will see. Every time we move from an AI winter to a summer, as has happened on account of Generative AI recently, the hype kicks in, and the popular press racks up the rhetoric and the hyperboles stack up. Initially it is about how the new capabilities can solve world poverty and more, and then (especially this time) its about how the AI overlord will take over and we head to apocalypse. My personal view is that Generative AI and LLMs (Large language models) are super exciting and come with capabilities closer to the hype, than ever before. I will also venture the view that the singularity is a while away, though the new tech certainly warrants safeguards and deliberate thought on responsible design. The Book of Minds was a part of my attempt to understand sentience and the ‘space of minds’ (especially non-human ones) as the author Phillip Ball calls it.
Keeping to his credentials as a science writer, the winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for his book Critical Mass and the editor of Nature for more than twenty years, Phillip Ball does a great job of bringing together all the thinking on what constitutes the human mind and the best way of thinking about non-human minds. The book brings together all the history and philosophical thinking on the space, and provides some great perspectives and thoughts along the way, though it stops short of an answer. Perhaps that is the nature of the topic, in that better understanding is the best we can achieve in the space, never a clear answer.
The book starts with the tough task of defining a mind and the spectrum of things that fall within its scope. Phillip Ball refers to the work of Aaron Sloman, who in 1984, started a discourse on the topic with his paper that called for a rethink on the concept of the mind. He goes on to refer to other influential thinkers and their contributions. Given the breadth of human capability, cultural differences, gender, age and other differences, we already start with a wide variety of ways we can segregate the mind. This is further complicated when we add the non-humans, i.e. animals and computers (perhaps aliens) to the mix. Then there is the index of measure, i.e. whether we want to measure all of these minds against a human average or some other scale. For instance, intelligence and consciousness are two dimensions we could use. This would separate out the simpler life forms and machines from humans on the consciousness spectrum. Measuring machines on the same scale gives them due credit due on the intelligence quadrant while calling out the consciousness gap. Speed of thought could be a dimension in case we want to account for the relatively slow response to stimuli by plants and even planetary systems vs our response speeds. Another way to slice this is to look at the spectrum of agency (self-control and action) and experience (emotion and sensation). The book also points out that while cognition and neural processing closely resemble computation, the mind does not arrive at its states by logical operations but by selection. The book speculates that perhaps computational and biological are the only fundamental ways in which minds could evolve. The richness discourse on the dimensionality points to the innate complexity of the topic, one we would do well to keep in mind, as we follow this debate on the subject of machine sentience.
Biological minds have evolved by natural selection shaped by the environment in which they thrived and succeeded, accounting for their diversity. Growth in external complexity led to minds moving from hard wired responses, machine like stimulus responses to abstracted predicted responses that resulted in success of the species. This led to evolution rewarding the growth of brains, though they are heavy resource consumers; and the success of the human race which is at the apex of this evolutionary trail. This also means that minds, in the biological context, exist to allow for greater range of responses to stimuli and by extension for free will. By way of contrast, machines are built to arrive at a response logically with no evolutionary bias. Also, the brain does not exist in isolation of the body, while AI can exist without form. The concept of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) hence seems a little moot as it seems to compare the incomparable. Looked at within the space of possible minds, AGI seems quite arbitrary. Humans are in a particular space in the spectrum through evolution and there would appear to be no need to see that as the right destination for AI.
All of this is fascinating especially when looked at in the backdrop of the current argument on the potential evolution to ‘sentience’ of the AI capabilities. Framing the debate around the right definition of sentience is perhaps the first step to a coherent argument on the topic. Sentience is perhaps not even what we need to be worrying about as the danger of the evolution of AI, but unforeseen and unpredictable outcomes of the use of the technology.
The book of minds is a good read, and offers a reasonably comprehensive coverage of a complex subject that gives us a lot of clarity on this ongoing discourse of potential machine sentience or the singularity as its popularly referred to. It certainly has a lot of great content and shone a bright light on a topic that can make do with the clarity (especially now), even though it seemed to stop short of being exhaustive and providing an answer especially in the context of the machine mind. Perhaps this is because of the rapid evolution in the space over the last few years. What it did do for me at least, was frame the question of the machine mind and the singularity, a little more clearly. Perhaps the better definition of singularity at this point is when we get to a place where machine outcomes cross the human capability to predict and control. The former point may have been crossed a while ago but control is definitely within our reach. The human differential has been our social capability and our ability to build and work with tools that gave us a multiplier on our resources. Not for the first time in our history, we have another great tool takes us to a significant inflection point in our growth as a race. Of course as ever the tool needs controls and we will need to act responsibly, as we always have, without losing ourselves to fear mongering and retaining perspective.
Philip Ball
‘The book of minds’ was the first non-fiction book I picked up this year after a heady dose of science fiction reads over the last months, a list that included some great new books and some that were just re-reads (please feel free to reach out for some great recommendations!). For many of you who reached out to comment on my LinkedIn review silence, it was not intentional, just happenstance in that I landed on a string of great science fiction reads and chose not to break a good run. Meanwhile it has been a period of extraordinary activity in my life and more importantly in topics core to my professional life. AI and ML are in the midst of prolific and unprecedented action, the likes of which I have not seen in the near 3 decades of my career in the space. The book pick was not random but deliberate as you will see. Every time we move from an AI winter to a summer, as has happened on account of Generative AI recently, the hype kicks in, and the popular press racks up the rhetoric and the hyperboles stack up. Initially it is about how the new capabilities can solve world poverty and more, and then (especially this time) its about how the AI overlord will take over and we head to apocalypse. My personal view is that Generative AI and LLMs (Large language models) are super exciting and come with capabilities closer to the hype, than ever before. I will also venture the view that the singularity is a while away, though the new tech certainly warrants safeguards and deliberate thought on responsible design. The Book of Minds was a part of my attempt to understand sentience and the ‘space of minds’ (especially non-human ones) as the author Phillip Ball calls it.
Keeping to his credentials as a science writer, the winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for his book Critical Mass and the editor of Nature for more than twenty years, Phillip Ball does a great job of bringing together all the thinking on what constitutes the human mind and the best way of thinking about non-human minds. The book brings together all the history and philosophical thinking on the space, and provides some great perspectives and thoughts along the way, though it stops short of an answer. Perhaps that is the nature of the topic, in that better understanding is the best we can achieve in the space, never a clear answer.
The book starts with the tough task of defining a mind and the spectrum of things that fall within its scope. Phillip Ball refers to the work of Aaron Sloman, who in 1984, started a discourse on the topic with his paper that called for a rethink on the concept of the mind. He goes on to refer to other influential thinkers and their contributions. Given the breadth of human capability, cultural differences, gender, age and other differences, we already start with a wide variety of ways we can segregate the mind. This is further complicated when we add the non-humans, i.e. animals and computers (perhaps aliens) to the mix. Then there is the index of measure, i.e. whether we want to measure all of these minds against a human average or some other scale. For instance, intelligence and consciousness are two dimensions we could use. This would separate out the simpler life forms and machines from humans on the consciousness spectrum. Measuring machines on the same scale gives them due credit due on the intelligence quadrant while calling out the consciousness gap. Speed of thought could be a dimension in case we want to account for the relatively slow response to stimuli by plants and even planetary systems vs our response speeds. Another way to slice this is to look at the spectrum of agency (self-control and action) and experience (emotion and sensation). The book also points out that while cognition and neural processing closely resemble computation, the mind does not arrive at its states by logical operations but by selection. The book speculates that perhaps computational and biological are the only fundamental ways in which minds could evolve. The richness discourse on the dimensionality points to the innate complexity of the topic, one we would do well to keep in mind, as we follow this debate on the subject of machine sentience.
Biological minds have evolved by natural selection shaped by the environment in which they thrived and succeeded, accounting for their diversity. Growth in external complexity led to minds moving from hard wired responses, machine like stimulus responses to abstracted predicted responses that resulted in success of the species. This led to evolution rewarding the growth of brains, though they are heavy resource consumers; and the success of the human race which is at the apex of this evolutionary trail. This also means that minds, in the biological context, exist to allow for greater range of responses to stimuli and by extension for free will. By way of contrast, machines are built to arrive at a response logically with no evolutionary bias. Also, the brain does not exist in isolation of the body, while AI can exist without form. The concept of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) hence seems a little moot as it seems to compare the incomparable. Looked at within the space of possible minds, AGI seems quite arbitrary. Humans are in a particular space in the spectrum through evolution and there would appear to be no need to see that as the right destination for AI.
All of this is fascinating especially when looked at in the backdrop of the current argument on the potential evolution to ‘sentience’ of the AI capabilities. Framing the debate around the right definition of sentience is perhaps the first step to a coherent argument on the topic. Sentience is perhaps not even what we need to be worrying about as the danger of the evolution of AI, but unforeseen and unpredictable outcomes of the use of the technology.
The book of minds is a good read, and offers a reasonably comprehensive coverage of a complex subject that gives us a lot of clarity on this ongoing discourse of potential machine sentience or the singularity as its popularly referred to. It certainly has a lot of great content and shone a bright light on a topic that can make do with the clarity (especially now), even though it seemed to stop short of being exhaustive and providing an answer especially in the context of the machine mind. Perhaps this is because of the rapid evolution in the space over the last few years. What it did do for me at least, was frame the question of the machine mind and the singularity, a little more clearly. Perhaps the better definition of singularity at this point is when we get to a place where machine outcomes cross the human capability to predict and control. The former point may have been crossed a while ago but control is definitely within our reach. The human differential has been our social capability and our ability to build and work with tools that gave us a multiplier on our resources. Not for the first time in our history, we have another great tool takes us to a significant inflection point in our growth as a race. Of course as ever the tool needs controls and we will need to act responsibly, as we always have, without losing ourselves to fear mongering and retaining perspective.
April 24, 2023
This book is not for everyone. However, since I have enjoyed Phillip Ball's other books and articles on science (particularly quantum mechanics, which he handled very well), I eagerly dove in and finished this recent offering of his. I, too, am intrigued by artificial intelligence (AI) and have a working background in machine learning as applied to signal processing, as well as a general interest in human cognition and ultimately what we call consciousness, so was naturally enticed to read this book (that was not-coincidentally brought to my attention by Amazon's ever pushy and annoying AI algorithms). Ball does a fairly credible job in grappling with a mystifying topic that is – pun intended – nowadays on everyone’s mind. But, spoiler alert, after some 500 pages, the reader is left with no firm finale or conclusion. Rather, this book is more like a dream where you are travelling with bizarre twists and turns to various unknown destinations, with all sorts of digressions and anxieties, only to wake up and realize it was only a dream (as is obviously what Ball experienced in doing the background work for this book). Kind of fun, but in the end, and even appreciating some of Ball’s lighthearted wit involved, one may not feel satisfied. And this conclusion, that I was forming while reading, was actually confirmed in his Acknowledgements! I offer the following criticisms, understanding fully that Ball had to draw some boundaries on this seemingly boundless topic, and on some technical points he missed.
First, Ball fails to mention the ‘Cognitive Revolution’, the phenomenon where humans apparently evolved to imagine and believe things that aren’t true around 70,000 years ago. In his book ‘Sapiens’ Yuval Harari declares that this ability to collectively believe in (and rally around) the same ideas, stories, rules, and goals enabled Sapiens to cooperate on a much wider scale than any other species on Earth. This is a key concept related to mindedness is a huge error of omission, particularly when looking across different animals on the planet, particularly as Ball did note cognitive similarities with other primates – and perhaps within our own Homo sapiens lineage. However, to Ball’s credit, he does recognize the Default Mode Network that likely offers insights into to the neurological mechanism for our ability to consider that which is not otherwise previously recognized.
And speaking of ignoring Harari, in his most recent book ‘Homo Deus’, Yuval Harari, convincingly envisions a future in which technology replaces human ideals and liberal government. Examining the concepts of religion, immortality, and technology, Harari argues that the world of the future very likely be run by advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence, not human beings. This omission might be in fact an example of the anti-machine prejudices Ball himself describes!
Second, Ball somehow diverged into considering the mindedness of extraterrestrial beings. Way off track, and had I been the editor, it would not have made the final cut. Especially since there is plenty of material on this topic here on planet earth. But I may be biased as I lean more to the view opined by James Lovelock that we are alone (see his recent and last book ‘Novacene’). Lovelock convincingly concludes that the argument for the possibility of extraterrestrial beings hinges on the huge numbers of cosmic objects is misleading. Insightfully, Lovelock observes that “It took the blindly groping process of evolution through natural selection 3.7 billion years – almost a third of the age of the cosmos – to evolve an understanding organism from the first primitive life forms. Furthermore, had the evolution of the solar system taken a billion years longer, there would be no one alive to talk about it. We would not have had time to attain the technological ability to cope with the increasing heat of the Sun. Seen from this perspective, it is clear that, ancient as it is, our cosmos is simply not old enough for the staggeringly improbable chain of events required to produce intelligent life to have occurred more than once. Our existence is a freakish one-off.” I see our inability to either accept or even grasp this likelihood as a clear function of what I described above: our cognitive ability to make stuff up and make others believe it.
I noted another omission: the lack of research in use of psychedelics in probing our Mindspace. With the preponderance of micro dosing in today’s society, this pharmacological practice has clear relevance into exploring the Space of Possible Minds just within any particular person, let alone in our collective.
Ball dropped the ball regarding epigenetics. Not a major topic in the book, but let’s simply say the genome is nothing without epigenetics. On the contrary, it is all about epigenetics and Darwinian fitness is much more completely understood by responses to the environment by gene expression that is driven by epigenetics. I would actually encourage Ball to really delve into epigenetics for his next project!
And there is Ball’s mention of a ‘Ford Pontiac’ car (page 454)! Readers from the US would immediately recognize this as an obvious mistake and impossible collaboration by two rival automakers. Perhaps, as Ball is from the UK, he meant Ford Prefect (which would have offered a jocular nod to Douglas Adam’s fictional character who did learn to communicate and cognate with extraterrestrial beings).
Finally, I do agree that Ball bit off a lot and as he admits in the Acknowledgements that the topic is better served by an encyclopedia than a book. Now he tells us readers that! My suggestion is that perhaps a better ending to this book would have been to quote Plato's account of the Greek philosopher Socrates statement " ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat.”
First, Ball fails to mention the ‘Cognitive Revolution’, the phenomenon where humans apparently evolved to imagine and believe things that aren’t true around 70,000 years ago. In his book ‘Sapiens’ Yuval Harari declares that this ability to collectively believe in (and rally around) the same ideas, stories, rules, and goals enabled Sapiens to cooperate on a much wider scale than any other species on Earth. This is a key concept related to mindedness is a huge error of omission, particularly when looking across different animals on the planet, particularly as Ball did note cognitive similarities with other primates – and perhaps within our own Homo sapiens lineage. However, to Ball’s credit, he does recognize the Default Mode Network that likely offers insights into to the neurological mechanism for our ability to consider that which is not otherwise previously recognized.
And speaking of ignoring Harari, in his most recent book ‘Homo Deus’, Yuval Harari, convincingly envisions a future in which technology replaces human ideals and liberal government. Examining the concepts of religion, immortality, and technology, Harari argues that the world of the future very likely be run by advanced algorithms and artificial intelligence, not human beings. This omission might be in fact an example of the anti-machine prejudices Ball himself describes!
Second, Ball somehow diverged into considering the mindedness of extraterrestrial beings. Way off track, and had I been the editor, it would not have made the final cut. Especially since there is plenty of material on this topic here on planet earth. But I may be biased as I lean more to the view opined by James Lovelock that we are alone (see his recent and last book ‘Novacene’). Lovelock convincingly concludes that the argument for the possibility of extraterrestrial beings hinges on the huge numbers of cosmic objects is misleading. Insightfully, Lovelock observes that “It took the blindly groping process of evolution through natural selection 3.7 billion years – almost a third of the age of the cosmos – to evolve an understanding organism from the first primitive life forms. Furthermore, had the evolution of the solar system taken a billion years longer, there would be no one alive to talk about it. We would not have had time to attain the technological ability to cope with the increasing heat of the Sun. Seen from this perspective, it is clear that, ancient as it is, our cosmos is simply not old enough for the staggeringly improbable chain of events required to produce intelligent life to have occurred more than once. Our existence is a freakish one-off.” I see our inability to either accept or even grasp this likelihood as a clear function of what I described above: our cognitive ability to make stuff up and make others believe it.
I noted another omission: the lack of research in use of psychedelics in probing our Mindspace. With the preponderance of micro dosing in today’s society, this pharmacological practice has clear relevance into exploring the Space of Possible Minds just within any particular person, let alone in our collective.
Ball dropped the ball regarding epigenetics. Not a major topic in the book, but let’s simply say the genome is nothing without epigenetics. On the contrary, it is all about epigenetics and Darwinian fitness is much more completely understood by responses to the environment by gene expression that is driven by epigenetics. I would actually encourage Ball to really delve into epigenetics for his next project!
And there is Ball’s mention of a ‘Ford Pontiac’ car (page 454)! Readers from the US would immediately recognize this as an obvious mistake and impossible collaboration by two rival automakers. Perhaps, as Ball is from the UK, he meant Ford Prefect (which would have offered a jocular nod to Douglas Adam’s fictional character who did learn to communicate and cognate with extraterrestrial beings).
Finally, I do agree that Ball bit off a lot and as he admits in the Acknowledgements that the topic is better served by an encyclopedia than a book. Now he tells us readers that! My suggestion is that perhaps a better ending to this book would have been to quote Plato's account of the Greek philosopher Socrates statement " ipse se nihil scire id unum sciat.”
March 20, 2023
I’m currently completing the draft of a novel in which machine intelligence plays a large part in moving the story, so I picked up this book by Ball on a recommendation from my wife who had read a review of it in Science. It’s a hefty tome, but easy to understand, but not dumbed down. Ball trusts the reader to follow both his explanations of where we stand regarding the ideas of intelligence—human, animal, and mechanical—including both the scientific basis as well as the philosophical ramifications. Heady stuff, indeed.
One takeaway, among many, is the very real difficulty in defining intelligence, which we’ve attempted to do for hundreds of years and constantly have to shift as new evidence emerges of tool use (once the bar set for animals) and communication (lack of being the argument against plants) in beings once thought free of those abilities.
Of course, as an SF writer, my focus is speculating what non-human intelligence might eventually emerge (or be recognized), and Ball provides some great insight into the elements considered necessary. But this is a product of its times—today—and this is a field that is rapidly being investigated and developed. I look forward to rereading this in a few years to consider what Ball got right and wrong, similar to when I first discovered the dinosaur theories about them being avian that has now become accepted in paleontology.
One takeaway, among many, is the very real difficulty in defining intelligence, which we’ve attempted to do for hundreds of years and constantly have to shift as new evidence emerges of tool use (once the bar set for animals) and communication (lack of being the argument against plants) in beings once thought free of those abilities.
Of course, as an SF writer, my focus is speculating what non-human intelligence might eventually emerge (or be recognized), and Ball provides some great insight into the elements considered necessary. But this is a product of its times—today—and this is a field that is rapidly being investigated and developed. I look forward to rereading this in a few years to consider what Ball got right and wrong, similar to when I first discovered the dinosaur theories about them being avian that has now become accepted in paleontology.
July 24, 2023
At 512 pages, this is a hefty and ambitious book!
What started out as an idea to write an article about artificial intelligence eventually turned into a full-blown dissection of minds from animals to plants to humans to artificial intelligence to aliens and even God!
What is a mind? The author defines it as follows: "For an entity to have a mind, there must be something it is like to be that entity."
He centers his study on the concept of a Space of Possible Minds (which he abbreviates as Mindspace), an idea proposed by Aaron Sloman.
Instead of looking at mindedness as a binary concept, there are degrees of what a mind can or cannot do. Different entities with these characteristics occupy a continuum (space) where "mind" can be considered present.
Spanning biology, astrobiology, neuroscience, computer science and philosophy utilizing thought experiments, there are also discussions of consciousness and free will.
A great book to engage with to expand your MIND!
What started out as an idea to write an article about artificial intelligence eventually turned into a full-blown dissection of minds from animals to plants to humans to artificial intelligence to aliens and even God!
What is a mind? The author defines it as follows: "For an entity to have a mind, there must be something it is like to be that entity."
He centers his study on the concept of a Space of Possible Minds (which he abbreviates as Mindspace), an idea proposed by Aaron Sloman.
Instead of looking at mindedness as a binary concept, there are degrees of what a mind can or cannot do. Different entities with these characteristics occupy a continuum (space) where "mind" can be considered present.
Spanning biology, astrobiology, neuroscience, computer science and philosophy utilizing thought experiments, there are also discussions of consciousness and free will.
A great book to engage with to expand your MIND!
December 19, 2024
A huge amount of information here, possibly too much for my brain to cope with. Have to admit to skimming a bit in the later chapters.
Basically we still don't know what a mind really is, or where it's physically located. It is a feature of (probably) all living things so the A of AI will always be pertinent. The darker aspect of anthropomorphism is arrogance, a belief that no other organisms could possibly have minds and emotions like us - which is patently nonsense.
Interesting ideas about free will though, maybe it doesn't exist and every decision made was pre-ordained by the laws of physics created at the Big Bang. Our minds simply make us feel like we made them...I
It's likely we'll never know what minds really are, maybe they are our souls, ghosts in the machine, and that's maybe for the best.
Basically we still don't know what a mind really is, or where it's physically located. It is a feature of (probably) all living things so the A of AI will always be pertinent. The darker aspect of anthropomorphism is arrogance, a belief that no other organisms could possibly have minds and emotions like us - which is patently nonsense.
Interesting ideas about free will though, maybe it doesn't exist and every decision made was pre-ordained by the laws of physics created at the Big Bang. Our minds simply make us feel like we made them...I
It's likely we'll never know what minds really are, maybe they are our souls, ghosts in the machine, and that's maybe for the best.
December 20, 2024
Did I learn a lot? Correct.
Was this an easy read? No.
I have a burning curiosity for how others think and operate so it was quite interesting to listen to the studies and findings presented in this book.
This was harder to digest as I felt like 'get to the point' but of course it's not about the point. It’s the journey, the studies, the theories and supporting evidence.
The knowledge and research put into this book is really vast. Many expansive comparisons and open or ongoing theories and discussions.
The digestion of this audio book was however very drawn out and laborious for me. I wish I could have gotten into the flow of it but that just never happened. Likely a me problem.
Was this an easy read? No.
I have a burning curiosity for how others think and operate so it was quite interesting to listen to the studies and findings presented in this book.
This was harder to digest as I felt like 'get to the point' but of course it's not about the point. It’s the journey, the studies, the theories and supporting evidence.
The knowledge and research put into this book is really vast. Many expansive comparisons and open or ongoing theories and discussions.
The digestion of this audio book was however very drawn out and laborious for me. I wish I could have gotten into the flow of it but that just never happened. Likely a me problem.
July 13, 2023
A rather interesting and in depth reflection on defining mindedness and consciousness within our current world and in prospective other worlds. The author takes an interesting look at various living things and provides a rationale for his views on the minds of various living things. At time the author gets a little too into topics such as brain structure, artificial intelligence, and aliens, but one can easily skim the less interesting sections.
October 2, 2022
Good overview and primer on the ontology of minds and mindedness from a largely scientific perspective - which is not easy to do. It transitioned smoothly from biology to animals to computers and aliens and it’s useful for people thinking between disciplines. Clearly written but perhaps under the strain of such a huge subject it lacks depth to some of the questions it asks itself.
October 18, 2022
I almost skipped on this one because I've read other books recently about the development of consciousness and things like that, but I'm glad that I ended up listening to this one. The author took this in some really interesting places, not just with AI, but also with a wide range of creatures in the animal world and what can be considered "a mind" etc. Would recommend.
December 8, 2023
i don’t really have an extensive frame of reference for this subject matter (when it comes to neuroscience or high level computer science), but nonetheless this book seems to be fair, well reasoned and (perhaps most importantly) intuitively correct in much of what it tackles. it was also just intensely fascinating so i’d happily recommend it off of that alone
June 2, 2024
Interesting to say the least.
A little complicated and hard to read at times but overall enjoyed it.
Really makes you think about consciousness and what a mind is, along with AI and our link to animals.
A little complicated and hard to read at times but overall enjoyed it.
Really makes you think about consciousness and what a mind is, along with AI and our link to animals.
December 13, 2022
The last hurrah for cognitive and neuro psychobabble?
August 17, 2023
It was a good read. This book goes in dept about the different theories of mind from animals to aliens to humans.
September 28, 2023
Hard to read at times, but it covers most of the bases (philosophy,biology, AI, history of those things)
November 21, 2023
Fascinating examination of mind in its many guises
March 29, 2024
Thoroughly enjoyed this run through the understanding of mind or the lack there of. Well written and comprehensive from multiple angles.
May 22, 2024
A bit here and there at times.
July 21, 2024
Excellent 👌
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