CONCEPT
Space of Possible Minds
Murray Shanahan’s corrective to anthropocentrism: the human mind occupies only a tiny explored corner of the vast space of conceivable cognitive architectures, and AI systems—neither falling short of the human standard nor measuring up to it—occupy a genuinely novel region that demands new categories rather than familiar verdicts.
The space of possible minds is an image and an argument. The image asks us to picture all conceivable cognitive systems arrayed in a vast space, each point representing a different possible architecture: different ways of acquiring information, processing it, integrating it, acting on it, learning from the consequences. Most of this space has never been instantiated by evolution and may never be. The human mind, primate cognition, animal minds more broadly—all of these occupy a tiny explored region, clustered together by our shared evolutionary history. Murray Shanahan’s argument is that this clustering makes our anthropomorphic intuitions about mind simultaneously natural and parochial: natural because it is all we have experienced, parochial because it is almost none of what is possible. The concept first appeared in the subtitle of his 2010 book Embodiment and the Inner Life: Cognition and Consciousness in the Space of Possible Minds
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