I got completely derailed in the notes of a mutual’s very good poast about bodies in Friends at the Table’s latest Realis arc and now have to spill my thoughts out here before they disappear.
Hey, isn’t it weird that conversations about AI are always about how mind-like it is but never about how body-like it is?
Think about it for a second.
We imagine AI as a mind-in-waiting. It just needs the right chipset to finally become A Real Person. But that’s not how minds work. Minds are features of bodies. Every mind we’ve ever encountered exists within a body that evolutionarily precedes the existence of minds. We can see in the fossil record and in our taxonomic cousins that minds are a thing that develop within bodies that have evolved to house them. But we do not talk about AI in this way. LLMs are almost body agnostic. They are developed not out of bodies but prior to bodies. We design them in theory, on paper, and then build bodies to run them. That’s not how minds work!!!!
We have never encountered a mind that functions in this way because minds are bodies. There can be no mind that exists prior to its body because a mind arises out of and in relation to the body. Minds are bodies! We hate thinking about them like this because our minds are capable of imagining themselves as distinct but guess what? A body can survive without a mind but a mind cannot survive without its body. Minds and all of their contents are meat! At least, all of the minds heretofore studied by empirical science. If we want to construct a mind out of something other than meat, we should probably start by building a body capable of developing a mind!
I guess the thing that I’m sort of orbiting here is that on top of the AI industry largely being a giant scam to prop up the American economy, the actual thing that your Sams Altman and Marks Zuckerberg are claiming to build is nothing like any mind we’ve ever encountered despite their insistence that it is, in fact, mind-like. This isn’t to say that alien minds that are unlike ours cannot exist, just that I am skeptical that this thing they claim is mind-like is in anyway mind-like for the simple reason that minds are bodies. Because we live in a society that reviles bodies, we have been made ill-equipped to recognize the fundamental con that’s being pulled here. We imagine our minds as separate from our bodies because our bodies disgust us. So when a conman who makes his living as a conman shows us a magic box and says “I built a mind — a mind that might be God! — and put it in this box.” we believe him. We believe him because we believe our minds could, theoretically, be put into a box too. But they can’t! Not right now, at least. And even if they could, that box would be just as much a body as the meat we are now is a body. For our mind to exist in that box, the box would have to be designed from the ground up to be a mind. We would not cease to be dependent on a body over which we have little control its functioning, rather the nature of that body would change. Because minds are fundamentally dependant. I like to be expansive in my assertions of what minds can depend on — after all, our human minds have made a great number of tools which we outsource our mentation to — but the fact of dependance remains. My mind is dependent upon all the physical things that make up my world. Including my body. Especially my body.
Until we recognize that minds are bodies, that minds are dependent on the physical world that pre-exists them, we will never construct one. Instead, we will build machines that increasingly abstract away from the bodies they are. We will build machines that imitate the way we imagine minds do instead of machines that work the actual way bodies do. Computational science is not abstract. Code is not abstract. Computation and code are physical things in the world, dependant upon bodies all their own. So long as we imagine that a mind can exist somehow on top of and not inside of the physical processes of computation, we will never build a silicon mind.
See, even there, I qualify the word mind with silicon because the mind cannot exist beyond or on top of the silicon. It exists in it. With it. It is it.
