A Mind-World Correspondence Principle

Chapter 10 A Mind-World Correspondence Principle 10.1 Introduction Real-world minds are always adapted to certain classes of environments and goals. The ideas of the previous chapter, regarding the connection between a human-like intelligence’s internals and its environment, result from exploring the implications of this adaptation in the context of the cognitive synergy concept. In this chapter we explore the mind-world connection in a broader and more abstract way — making a more ambitious attempt to move toward a "general theory of general intelligence." One basic premise here, as in the preceding chapters is: Even a system of vast general intelligence, subject to real-world space and time constraints, will necessarily be more efficient at some kinds of learning than others. Thus, one approach to formulating a general theory of general intelligence is to look at the relationship between minds and worlds — where a "world" is conceived as an environment and a set of goals defined in terms of that environment. In this spirit, we here formulate a broad principle binding together worlds and the minds that are intelligent in these worlds. The ideas of the previous chapter constitute specific, concrete instantiations of this general principle. A careful statement of the principle requires introduction of a number of technical concepts, and will be given later on in the chapter. A crude, informal version of the principle would be: MIND-WORLD CORRESPONDENCE-PRINCIPLE For a mind to work intelligently toward certain goals in a certain world, there should be a nice mapping from goal-directed sequences of world-states into sequences of mind-states, where "nice" means that a world-state-sequence W composed of two parts W, and Wo, gets mapped into a mind-state-sequence M composed of two corresponding parts M, and Mo. What’s nice about this principle is that it relates the decomposition of the world into parts, to the decomposition of the mind into parts. 177 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013093