After spending a decade or two living inside a mind, you might think you knew a bit about how minds work, right? That’s what quite a few AGI wannabes (people who think they’ve got what it takes to program an Artificial General Intelligence) seem to have concluded. This, unfortunately, is wrong.

Artificial Intelligence is fundamentally about reducing the mental to the non-mental.

You might want to contemplate that sentence for a while. It’s important.

Living inside a human mind doesn’t teach you the art of reductionism, because nearly all of the work is carried out beneath your sight, by the opaque black boxes of the brain. So far beneath your sight that there is no introspective sense that the black box is there—no internal sensory event marking that the work has been delegated.

Did Aristotle realize that when he talked about the telos, the final cause of events, that he was delegating predictive labor to his brain’s complicated planning mechanisms—asking, “What would this object do, if it could make plans?” I rather doubt it. Aristotle thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood—which he did think was important: humans, thanks to their larger brains, were more calm and contemplative.

So there’s an AI design for you! We just need to cool down the computer a lot, so it will be more calm and contemplative, and won’t rush headlong into doing stupid things like modern computers. That’s an example of fake reductionism. “Humans are more contemplative because their blood is cooler,” I mean. It doesn’t resolve the black box of the word contemplative. You can’t predict what a contemplative thing does using a complicated model with internal moving parts composed of merely material, merely causal elements—positive and negative voltages on a transistor being the canonical example of a merely material and causal element of a model. All you can do is imagine yourself being contemplative, to get an idea of what a contemplative agent does.

Which is to say that you can only reason about “contemplative-ness” by empathic inference—using your own brain as a black box with the contemplativeness lever pulled, to predict the output of another black box.

You can imagine another agent being contemplative, but again that’s an act of empathic inference—the way this imaginative act works is by adjusting your own brain to run in contemplativeness-mode, not by modeling the other...