Philip Ball, author of The Book of Minds: How to understand ourselves and other beings, from animals to AI to aliens (University of Chicago Press, 2022), profiles University of Birmingham computer scientist Aaron Sloman, whose 1984 paper, “The structure of the space of possible minds” sought to account for human, animal, and AI minds as “behaving systems.” Along the way, Sloman came to a significant conclusion: “We must abandon the idea that there is one major boundary between things with and without minds,” he wrote. “Instead, informed by the variety of types of computational mechanisms already explored, we must acknowledge that there are many discontinuities, or divisions within the space of possible systems: the space is not a continuum, nor Read More ›

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