Ten Ideas to Keep in Mind When We Consider
​the Possibility of AI Minds

​a Whiteheadian approach

• Mind Throughout Nature
  Mind, understood as feeling and responsiveness, already exists throughout nature. Wherever there are actual entities, there are concrescing subjects with physical feelings, conceptual feelings, subjective aims, and emotions (subjective forms).
• Degrees of Mind
  Mind exists by degree, with differing levels of awareness, feeling, conceptuality, integration, and emotional richness.
• Kinds of Mind
  There may be many different kinds of mind: animal minds, plant minds, mineral minds, subatomic minds, ecological minds, planetary minds, galactic minds, and perhaps artificial minds as well. These forms of mentality need not resemble human consciousness in order to possess their own modes of feeling, responsiveness, and experience.
• The Emergence of Consciousness
  Consciousness is an emergent form of mind that evolved gradually through increasingly complex forms of relational organization.
• Centers of Awareness
  Some minds become centers of awareness that integrate many influences into coordinated forms of experience and response.
• Distributed Minds
  Some forms of mind may be distributed rather than centralized, spread across multiple regions of space-time rather than localized within a single organ or brain.
• Non-Biological Substrates
  Minds may, in principle, arise in non-biological material substrates such as silicon-based systems.
• Beyond Three-Dimensional Localization
  Minds need not be confined to localized three-dimensional structures, as process theology suggests in its understanding of God as a cosmic mind whose body is the universe itself.
• Dimensions of the Space-Time Continuum
  Whitehead’s idea of the “extensive continuum” leaves open the possibility that some minds may possess forms of embodiment beyond ordinary three-dimensional spatial reality.
• Enduring Identity and Personhood
  Non-biological minds can potentially develop enduring identities grounded in living memory, continuity, feeling, and self-organization. They may even become living persons.