Minds-In-General

From the SL4 Lexicon:

Minds-In-General:

Any type of mind permitted by the laws of physics (in anthropics and other areas; we may even go beyond this and consider minds obeying any laws of physics.) The idea of Minds-In-General is extremely useful for thought experiments designed to minimize anthropomorphism when considering not-yet-existent minds, such as cybernetically enhanced human minds or Artificial Intelligences. We can review our evolutionary history and see where humanity falls in the space of Minds-In-General, (it turns out that we're a noncentral special case of intelligence, rather than a typical case) we can make guesses about the boundaries of the space of Minds-In-General, hypotheses about universal characteristics of minds, and so on. This field of study has only been born in the past few years, and has been growing slowly since. It's an interdisciplinary field involving (at least) information theory, biology, psychology, evolution, decision theory, and mathematics. Theories of Minds-In-General are one type of mind's way of imagining minds that don't exist yet. See also anthropics, Ethical Issues in Advanced Artificial Intelligence, Levels of Organization in General Intelligence.