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Does it take a mind to detect a mind? Can a non-mind/anti-mind ever detect a mind?

• http://cogsciphi.blogspot.in/2009/06/world-is-everything-that-is-case.html : Does it take a mind to detect a mind? Consider that so much of science depends on the unintelligent detection of unintelligents. In the Sterling short story "Swarm" (excerpts http://cogsciphi.blogspot.com/2009/06/excerpts-from-sterlings-swarm.html), the Nest is this asteroid that is mostly just a big super-organism that wanders the universe and whenever it is "invaded" it assimilates the invaders. Most of the various diverse species in the asteroid were once representatives of vast space-faring technological cultures that, when they encountered the Nest, got taken over and reduced to unintelligent animals and integrated into the Nest ecology inside of the asteroid. Swarm is an intelligent organism activated under certain instances for the protection of the Nest. Swarm explains how ultimately useless intelligence and consciousness is and suggests that the Nest is entirely unintelligent, and that the Nest grows a new Swarm whenever an intelligent invader needs to be dealt with. Once the intelligent invader is dealt with (rendered into a dumb slave animal) then Swarm self-destructs being no longer needed. It occured to me that Swarm was to minds what antibodies are to germs, so I coined "anti-mind". It also occurred to me that if Swarm was right that prior to the activation of Swarm, the Nest group organism was truly non-cognitive, then whatever mechanism that activates the growth of a new Swarm must itself be an unintelligent mechanism. So, the idea of an anti-mind is the idea of a thing that is not a mind but is capable of detecting minds. But this leads to what strikes me as some pretty interesting philosophical questions: Is there any way a dumb mechanism can detect the presence of intelligence? Can an unconscious mechanism detect the presence of consciousness? Am I rephrasing the Turing Test or is this something deeper? If Dennett is right, intentional systems are detectable only from the intentional stance, which I take to entail that only minds can detect minds. If a lot of qualia-freaks are right, the only way to detect the presence of qualia is to have some yourself, and thus only consciousness can detect consciousness.

• Answer:

  I don't know! :) Not sure I even understand the terms of the question, really. My issue with discussions like this is they sort of jump right into the philosophical debate without trying to define terms. What does detection mean? What is intelligence? And what is "cognitive"? When an electron modifies its behavior in the presence of a proton, does that mean one has "detected" the other? When a single-celled organism engulfs a piece of food, does that imply that it "detected" it? When a smartphone registers the presence of a WiFi signal, has it "detected" it? If your answer to any of these questions is yes (and it doesn't have to be), then I don't see why a non-mind can't detect a mind. But. First, you have to explicitly define what a mind is in terms that the non-mind can work with. A cell's implicit definition of food involves molecular mechanisms. A smartphone contains an antenna that allows it to detect WiFi signals -- the resonance frequencies and the antenna act together to serve as implicit definitions. A non-mind that detects a mind is a kind of reverse Turing Test, maybe? Are you asking if a non-mind that was not designed by a mind can detect a mind? Since I know of no rocks that jiggle in the presence of minds, I can only say... maybe? The question then is this: do minds have some measurable physical signature that distinguishes them from non-minds? Again, I don't know. It can't just be "the ability to utter coherent sentences". Algorithms (which presumably don't yet have minds) can do this already. We can't use the Turing Test because that involves an actual person. I imagine a lot of tests we come up with will detect all living things, or all living things that have such-and-such gene or cell or tissue or arrangement of organs. But I can't really rule out the possibility that some weird alien planet happens to create a rock that preferentially jiggles in the presence of minds. Having said that I'm not sure what we have established though. :) Now let me quibble about a couple of lines that stood out for me. "Jerry Fodor has suggested that non-natural kinds like crumpled shirts or doorknobs can only be detected by minds." I don't know about this. What are natural kinds? I think there are just kinds. Period. There are categories. Some categories are useful for particular species or particular individuals, and some aren't. Every life form is capable of making some distinctions and not others (warm and cold, light and dark, water and no water, up and down, friend and foe, food and poison, crumpled and not crumpled). If I selectively breed bacteria so that after a few thousand generations they gravitate towards doorknobs or crumpled shirts, does that count as detection? If I use a machine learning algorithm to identify doorknobs and crumpled shirts (probably not that difficult nowadays), is that detection? "Consider that so much of science depends on the unintelligent detection of unintelligents." What on earth does this mean? :) Blog posts like this tend to make me more sympathetic to panpsychism. I like the idea that mind is a continuum -- so a photon has very little mind, and a human has more. I also think that from an external perspective mind is the ability to detect patterns of mass and/or energy -- to make distinctions and alter behavior accordingly. Since all matter interacts with something or the other, any "thing" can be interpreted as being a detector, and therefore, having a bit of mind. The "amount" or "particularity" of mind might correspond to the types of distinctions it can perceive. Just thinking aloud actually. Thanks for the A2A!