Michael Levin

I think the categories of different types of minds, I think is extremely interesting.

And to the extent that we think our categories are complete and are cutting nature at its joints, we are going to be very poorly placed to recognize novel systems.

So, for example, a lot of people will say, well, this is intelligent and this isn't.

And there's a binary thing, and that's useful occasionally.

That's useful for some things.

I would like to say, instead of that, let's admit that we have a spectrum.

But instead of just saying, oh, look, everything's intelligent, right?

Because if you do that, you're right.

You can't do anything after that.

What I'd like to say instead is, no, no, you have to be very specific as to what kind and how much.

In other words, what problem space is it operating in?

What kind of mind does it have?

What kind of cognitive capacities does it have?

You have to actually be much more specific.

And we can even name, right?

That's fine.

We can name different types of, I mean, this is doing predictive processing.

This can't do that, but it can form memories.

What kind?

Well, habituation and sensitization, but not associative conditioning.