How does a mind work ?

Context

To design the equivalent of a biological mind for our society, we need to define and understand the basics of how a mind functions.

Question

What are the basic functions and workings of a mind ?

Study

Function

For a biological being, the brain has only one function: to make decisions, whether it's muscle contraction or hormone release.

Definition

To simplify reasoning, we will redefine the word mind with a definition specific to this document: A mind is an information processing system that issues the main decisions of a living entity.

We saw in the modeling section that humanity resembles a living entity because the assembly of humans in a societal organism has many characteristics of life (dynamic balance, efficiency gains, high interdependence, decision-making organs, energy management systems, etc.).

Functioning

The basic elements

We will focus on sophisticated minds, like the human mind. The main basic elements are:

Inputs: Everything that captures information and brings it into the mind
Outputs: The information that goes from the mind to the outside. For example, nerve impulses leaving the brain.
Input processing: Initial analysis to provide an internal representation of the captured information. For example, in human vision, the occipital lobe analyzes signals from the retina.
Output processing: Transformation of internal representations into signals adapted for the outputs. For example, to transform the words we want to speak into nerve impulses for the speech muscles.
Decision system (consciousness): Centralization of information in the form of high-level representations to confront the various relevant elements in order to act (whether internally, like evaluating emotions towards a person, or externally, like deciding to move).
Filtering information reaching consciousness: Prevents consciousness from being cluttered with undesirable information. For example, when searching for vertical white rivers in text (caused by random vertical alignment of spaces), you start to see them everywhere because your filter lets through this usually irrelevant information (move further away from the screen and try to see them for about twenty seconds if it doesn't work).
Memory: Stores the representation of reality. Knowing that the mind can also represent its internal reality, for example, we can remember feeling sad at an event, which partially corresponds to the inner reality that is the emotion of sadness.
Automatisms: Allows a sequence of decisions to be made without cluttering consciousness when the decisions to be made are identical to habits
Emotions: Orients the mind in a direction and with a certain intensity. For example, if we feel love towards a person, it generally guides us towards, among other things, cooperation. It is important to distinguish between emotions triggered by instinctive mechanisms (e.g., the pleasure of eating) and emotions arising from reflection (e.g., enthusiasm for taking action). Instinctive emotions are the basic directions on which our mind is built, for example, if we felt instinctive pleasure in traveling and displeasure in being sedentary, then the entire society would be organized around nomadism.

Important properties

Representation of reality: Every information processing system (bacteria, human, computer, etc.) has different forms of representation of reality. These representations are crucial for the functioning of the mind. The more advanced a mind is, the deeper its representation of reality is because a well-structured representation of reality is necessary to be an effective general intelligence.
The method of thinking: The role of consciousness is quite sophisticated: how to assemble various emotions, which cognitive resources to allocate, what logic to use, what exceptions to apply, etc.

Practical cases

We started from the case of the human to build a representation of a mind. We can now compare it with different real-world examples that differ from the basic model (the human).

A country

A country involves many individual decisions, just as in our body, cells use information to "decide" (even if these are simple biochemical mechanisms). To analyze the mind of a country, we must focus on the decision-making system that impacts the entire country.

There are two primary decision modes: popular movement and government. A popular movement can manifest in different forms:

elections
an uprising influencing the government
a revolution
a horizontal change (not impacting the government), such as a change in customs

We refer to these as primary decisions because these two entities can be influenced by others, making these sources of influence important elements in decision-making. This could be, for example, the media or the example of another country.

Since this is a first practical case, we can simplify and reduce the analysis to decision-making by the government.

Outputs: These are the government's decision channels, such as a directive addressed to a category of personnel or a law.
Inputs: These are all the information that reaches the government: watching television, a letter addressed to a minister, etc.
Input processing: This is the formatting of raw information into standard forms for the government (e.g., briefing notes).
Output processing: This is the work of the staff who prepare the information to put it in an appropriate form.
Decision system (consciousness): These are the people who actually make decisions, for example, in England, this would be a prime minister or the people who decide on voting instructions.
Filtering information reaching consciousness: These are the assistants of the people playing the role of consciousness: they prepare the information that is relevant according to the directives of the consciousness.
Memory: These are the memories of the people plus the memories on physical media (paper, computers)
Emotions: These are essentially the emotions of the people playing the role of consciousness.
Automatisms: These are the decisions made by other members than the decision-makers (those playing the role of consciousness) and are in line with the directives of the decision-makers.

In conclusion, we see that a government can be viewed as a mind, but due to decision-making being reduced to a few people, it does not have great organizational/cognitive interest.

The scientific system

We will apply the model to the global scientific system (since science is international) by considering the global influences that the scientific community has on society. For example, an article far removed from practical applications and remaining internal to the scientific field will not be considered an output.

Outputs: These are discoveries considered to influence society, plus communications from scientists to society.
Inputs: The results of experiments. Scientific communications are not inputs since they remain internal; they are more like "internal thoughts.".
Input processing: Computers and other devices can handle formatting the observations.
Output processing: These are the publishing bodies.
Decision system (consciousness): Each researcher can publish, so we have a distributed system. Thought, confronting facts to improve representations of reality, is also distributed.
Filtering information reaching consciousness: Since consciousness is distributed among different researchers, there is no filtering except for individual filtering.
Memory: It consists of individual memory and various documents.
Emotions: There is no special system for coordinating emotions. Furthermore, energy direction is achieved externally through budget allocation.
Automatisms: There are none. For example, there are regular reports, which are decisions from the model's perspective, but they are not handled by automatisms.

Research maintains a high quality of thinking method through a system of preliminary selection and by giving more power and notoriety to effective individuals.

Analysis of practical cases

We have two opposing systems: one distributed and the other where a very small number of people play the role of consciousness. One achieves coherence through a quality standard (via diplomas) and the promotion of effectiveness, the other through a reduced number of individuals (who therefore coordinate in the usual way). One has very little at stake since, in many areas, scientific results have a positive effect, while the other has enormous stakes.

Answer

The study shows that cognitive processes leading to decisions can be seen in various social organs. The two examples show us that depending on the case, we can achieve very different organizations. We have defined basic elements, but an advanced mind includes a great richness of structures.