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Session 2

  • Chapter
Simulating the Mind

Abstract

Ideas developed by the author over the last 35 years, about relations between the study of natural minds and the design of artificial minds, and the requirements for both sorts of minds, are summarised. The most important point is that natural minds are information-processing virtual machines produced by evolution. Much detailed investigation of the many kinds of things minds can do is required in order to determine what sort of information-processing machine a human mind is. It is not yet clear whether producing artificial minds with similar powers will require new kinds of computing machinery or merely much faster and bigger computers than we have now. Some things once thought hard to implement in artificial minds, such as affective states and processes, including emotions, can be construed as aspects of the control mechanisms of minds. This view of mind is largely compatible in principle with psychoanalytic theory, though some details are very different. Psychoanalytic therapy is analogous to run-time debugging of a virtual machine. In order to do psychotherapy well, we need to understand the architecture of the machine well enough to know what sorts of bugs can develop and which ones can be removed, or have their impact reduced, and how. Without such deep understanding treatment will be a hit-and-miss affair.

This work was partly supported by the EU CoSy project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The University Of Birmingham, UK

    Aaron Sloman

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  1. Aaron Sloman
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Computer Technology, University of Vienna, Austria

    Dietmar Dietrich , Gerhard Zucker  & Dietmar Bruckner ,  & 

  2. Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Austria

    Georg Fodor

  3. University of Cape Town, South Africa

    Georg Fodor

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Sloman, A. (2009). Session 2. In: Dietrich, D., Fodor, G., Zucker, G., Bruckner, D. (eds) Simulating the Mind. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-211-09451-8_6

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