Most scientific definitions should try to be short and sweet. Definitions that include a description of the human mind are ones to eliminate.
Here, the idea that purpose is a psychological phenomenon is exactly what was intended to be avoided - the idea is to give a nuts-and-bolts description of purposefulness.
Re: defining "mind" - not a big deal. I just mean a nervous system - so a dedicated signal processing system with I/O, memory and processsing capabilities.
Re: defining "mind" - not a big deal. I just mean a nervous system - so a dedicated signal processing system with I/O, memory and processsing capabilities.
Any nervous system? That seems like a bad idea. Is a standard neural net trained to recognize human faces a mind? Is a hand-calculator a mind? Also, how does one define having a memory and processing capabilities. For example, does an abacus have a mind? What about a slide rule? What about a Pascaline or an Arithmometer?
Sweet, there's another Bloggingheads episode with Eliezer.
Bloggingheads: Robert Wright and Eliezer Yudkowsky: Science Saturday: Purposes and Futures