The subjectiverse: part 1

A term for the space of all possible experiences to be had

In the coming decades we will see an explosion of new types of minds, as we’ll able to seed AIs, building synthetic minds, as well as augment ourselves. This upcoming “Cambrian explosion” of minds will mean that we will be exploring so-called mind design space - which I prefer to call cognitive construction space - that is the total amount of possible minds that can exist in our universe, on which humans are but a speck. If we assume for the moment that a mind can only be called a mind if it has subjective experience or phenomenal consciousness, then you can imagine the vast space of new subjective experiences there will be out there to explore. We don’t have a word for that, and it would be very convenient to have, so I hereby introduce the subjectiverse, and in this series of posts I discusss how we may initially explore it, individually or collectively, and report on it.

Introduction
For many thousands of years the human mind has been stagnant and unmodifiable. Today we’re at the eve of radical self-modification, and within decades the sort of minds we’ll design and seed, the ways we’ll be able to augment our minds, will be numerous. Typically the space of all possible minds is called mind design space, but I don’t quite like this term, for two reasons. Firstly, not all minds are designed, some are evolved. It doesn’t quite make sense to speak of designs when there is no designer. Secondly, I think it will be computationally and practically intractable to fully design minds, rather, we’ll seed and grow them. So designed minds will be a subset of all minds. For this reason I prefer to use the term cognitive construction space, which can subdivide in evolved, designed and seeded minds. We might care to make more distinctions in the future, for examples for synthetic minds being seeded, while organic ones being grown, and yet other ones constructed.

With respect to brains, these of course belong to evolved minds for now until we grow them. Future minds won’t just run on brains, but various different hardware and software, if you’ll tolerate that analogy for a moment. So I’ve adopted the term cognitive apparatus as a future-proof and hardware-agnostic term for all future minds.

So to explore the subjectiverse we have to speculate about current minds and future minds.

Exploration
The subjectiverse is a vast space of state spaces of all minds that may be impossible to explore due to the sheer amount of configurations possible. All possible minds, times all possible dynamics or interactions with environment, times interactions with other minds, so on and so forth. This is a veritable combinatorial explosion and thus intractable to map as well. So when it comes to speculating, tomes upon tomes can be filled with it and battles have to be picked.

Seeding, building and growing minds brings endless challenges as well, which is outside of the scope of this post. I’ll cherry-pick specific problems that are especially interesting when getting one’s feet wet in exploring the idea of the subjectiverse.

The unaugmented human mind: commensurability
Homo sapiens is a species and at that level there is homogeneity, but within the species there is of course a lot of variance, with various spectra on which human minds exist. While avoiding issues regarding the existence of qualia, let’s at least establish that we obviously don’t have direct access to others’ experiences. Yet not only do we know it should be possible in principle, we have living proof of it. Conjoined twins are twins that are born fused together. Some of them have body parts fused that are relatively realistic to separate, others have for examples a fused head, including the brain. From these examples we know that fiction like Vulcan mind melding can become reality. Conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana have a conjoined thalamus, the part of the brain that sends physical sensations and motor functions to the cerebral cortex, allowing them to hear each other's thoughts and see through each other's eyes.

This possibility quickly seduces one to imagine the idea that the subjectiverse can be readily explored collectively and that these experiences can be shared. Where we normally rely on empathy with mirror neurons and such helping us imagine generically what another is going going through, we could connect minds and not only are such connections part of the subjectiverse and this constitute exploration, we could explore them together. However, it might be very far from that simple, even with all the liberties we have taken to explore this idea. Generally speaking each connectome, or wiring diagram of each human brain, is completely unique, like a fingerprint.

Even if we were to magically share a memory from brain A to brain B, brain B’s connectome would process that memory very differently from A. Consider for example an anxiety-inducing memory of brain A, that induces no anxiety in brain B, simply because brain B does not share brain A’s anxieties. Activation levels in various brain parts, like for example in the thalamus, will differ from brain to brain, with one perfectly stable and healthy mind, and another a mind suffering PTSD. So here we stumble upon a fundamental problem: even within one species with relatively homogeneity, we find that a vast amount of experience is likely incommensurable across minds.

For the same reason, by the way, it’s impossible to just blast an unaugmented brain with knowledge like in the movie The Matrix. If it were a knowledge graph to be implemented into a brain, that graph would need to be tailor-made for that brain if it were to integrate into the connectome as it normally would.

So how does the unaugmented human mind explore the subjectiverse and share? Unfortunately, the only options here are simply existing and by virtue of experience and learning modifying one’s brain, and inducing mind-altering states, be a God helmet - an experimental apparatus that that simulates the temporal lobe and had many subjects report a religious presence, getting drunk or doing psychedelics. After that we can only talk about it. The philosopher Daniel Dennett came up with heterophenomenology, where third person reports about experience are taken to be authoritative. He dubbed it the scientific method with an anthropological bend. But this too runs into the issue of incommensurability. Of course, in practice, there is lots of agreement on how things feel and affect us across a wide array of experiences. Yet there remains a vast gap between agreeing about reports and being able to truly verify and share experiences.

So to explore the subjectiverse beyond that which we’re doing already by living and experiencing life, we have to turn our focus to the augmented human mind. Coming in part 2.