The Book of Minds Quotes

“system in question. States of matter”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Science fiction is filled with tales of AI not doing what we want it to. From the machines of Isaac Asimov’s I”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith says that our encounters with them are ‘probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.’ It’s surely no coincidence that so many fictional aliens”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“In 2019”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“We don’t know what cognitive architecture it takes to introduce this rather sophisticated idea into one’s internal model of the world – but we do know that human infants don’t require any profound neural rewiring to go from a solipsistic world view to a Theory of Mind.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Thinking of others Our capacity for abstract reasoning is just one of the ways we seem to differ from other apes. Some researchers suggest that the key difference is our superior ‘executive functioning’: an ability to control or defer our innate instincts so that we can bring those powerful rational decision-making skills to bear.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Symbolic comprehension of tools seems a step too far for these and other animals.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“The conceptual world from which an intelligent creature’s intuitive physics is drawn seems likely to be shaped by its physical and sensory environments: that’s inherent in the very notion of an Umwelt.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Chimps”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Chimps seem also to have an intuitive physics: they know that objects continue to exist when out of sight”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Our mental superpower is perhaps the capacity to construct new and totally imaginary scenarios: possible futures”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“If there’s one thing that truly distinguishes humans from other animals”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“It is from the Umwelt that a creature builds its conception of the world. It is the organizational framework of its mind: what”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Umwelt. An animal’s Umwelt reflects what ‘stands out’ for it in the environment: what it notices and what it does not”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Animal behaviourist Con Slobodchikoff”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“never underestimate the extent to which old ideas still pervade the assumptions of science.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has pointed out”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Charles Darwin had no doubt that other animals have minds. There are”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Indeed, Koch believes that some, perhaps most, of those little organoids made already might possess a small degree of consciousness: they could have a significant value of Φ, the measure of consciousness in integrated information theory.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“And they are being created to investigate why the Covid-19 coronavirus causes brain damage in some people: you obviously can’t infect a person to find out, but there’s no ethical problem (yet) with infecting an organoid.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“organoids can help to tackle the problem that it is hard to take a good look at a human brain while it is still alive.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Some types of mental illness, such as schizophrenia and dementia, can cause a condition called anosognosia, in which people become unable to acknowledge their illness or other afflictions or injuries. It’s a genuine breakdown of the brain’s ability to diagnose the state of the self and to map the body:”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“As with other senses, there is here an element of prediction and inference involved: if interoception tells the mind something, the mind makes best guesses about the cause.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Assigning an anatomical seat of consciousness is confounded by the old saw that correlation is not causation: just because a brain region is needed to sustain consciousness doesn’t mean it arises there.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“IIT insists that consciousness is only possible in systems that have the ability to affect themselves by re-entrant processing. Feed-forward systems like those of today’s silicon chips can produce nothing but ‘zombie minds’ – which might, given enough complexity, act as if they are conscious but cannot truly possess that property. ‘Digital computers can simulate consciousness, but the simulation has no causal power and is not actually conscious’, says Koch. It’s like a physicist simulating gravity in a computer model of how a star or a galaxy forms: that doesn’t actually generate a gravitational attraction between the computer’s circuit components.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Figure 4.1. In the global workspace theory of consciousness, inputs from various brain functions and modules are evaluated and combined in the global workspace before being broadcast as a single conscious experience to the rest of the brain.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“An alternative theory devised by Giulio Tononi and his coworkers, particularly Christof Koch, takes this top-down view. ‘To be conscious is to have an experience,’ says Tononi. It doesn’t have to be an experience about anything, although it can be; dreams, or some ‘blank mind’ states attained by meditation, count as conscious experiences. Tononi and Koch claim to identify the essential, axiomatic features of such conscious experiences, saying that these are: Intrinsic existence: Conscious experience is real, and is the only reality of which I can be sure. It is moreover inevitably subjective, existing only for the conscious entity. Structured: Experiences have distinct elements, such as objects and colours, not just a mush of sensory input. Specific: An experience ‘is what it is’: rich in information and distinct from other experiences. Unified or integrated: We have only one experience at a time. Definitive: There are borders to what the experience contains, which exclude some aspects of what is ‘out there’. From these axioms, Tononi and Koch aim to deduce the properties that any physical system must possess if it is to have some degree of consciousness. Their approach is called integrated information theory (IIT).”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“Figure 4.2. You can ‘see’ the Necker cube in two possible orientations – but only one at a time, reflecting how only one ‘interpretation’ of the world can occupy the crucible of consciousness at any given time.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“One of the aims of the mind, Bor says, is to relegate things from the conscious to the unconscious mind to free up the working memory to hold new items.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens

“For example, we may reduce collections of many objects to a smaller number of composite ones: a process cognitive scientists call ‘chunking’. We’re no worse at remembering random words than random letters, because we process a word as a unified whole rather than as a string of letters.”
― Philip Ball, The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens