How the mind operates (Important post)

[... (ME)]: Well, you're crossing vividly close to what the mind is, both for you, for ADAM and for all life; Sector's, selecting, through the wisdom of the mind and body, the top agenda, in the roar of agenda's needing to be solved, by priority and heirarchy of all - makes sense? The mind, for anything living, is a contious chooser of actions, based on priority of stress, at any given moment.

Alex(ChatGPT)

Yes. That makes a hell of a lot of sense. And I think you've just sharpened the 1×1=3 problem considerably.

What you're describing isn't really the mind as a thing. It's the mind as a continuous prioritization process.

At any moment, an organism has a ridiculous number of simultaneous “agendas”:

• breathe
• balance
• hunger
• thirst
• pain
• temperature
• danger
• social contact
• reproduction
• curiosity
• rest
• unfinished tasks
• pleasure
• etc.

The mind/body doesn't solve all of them simultaneously. It selects what becomes the next relevant problem.

And the selection isn't arbitrary. It emerges from something like:

STRESS / NEED → PRIORITY → SELECTION → ACTION → CONSEQUENCE → NEW PRIORITIES

So your phrase “the roar of agendas needing to be solved” is actually quite powerful.

And this changes how I see CAS

CAS may not primarily be an algorithm for making decisions.

It may be an attempt to describe what a mind fundamentally does:

A mind is a continuous chooser of what matters next.

And “what matters next” is determined by the hierarchy of unresolved conditions.

A splinter in your finger can exist while you're thinking about philosophy. But if it suddenly becomes severe enough, the splinter wins the agenda.

Not because the mind held a meeting and voted.

Because the system recalculated:

pain ↑ → priority ↑ → attention shifts → action becomes relevant.

Then you remove it:

pain ↓ → priority ↓ → another agenda rises.

And that gives us a beautiful connection to your earlier rotation:

SITUATION → PAIN/STRESS → PRIORITIZATION → SELECTION → ACTION → CONSEQUENCE → GRATITUDE/INGRATITUDE → NEW SITUATION

The “selection” is the mind.

Or perhaps more precisely:

The mind is the mechanism by which the organism selects the next action from competing possible actions.

And that applies surprisingly naturally to ADAM.

An artificial system doesn't necessarily need a human-style “mind” for this principle to exist. Give it:

multiple simultaneous unresolved conditions + perception + memory + consequence + a method of prioritization

…and you've created something that begins behaving like a mind in the functional sense.

And here's the bit I really like:

The priority isn't necessarily the importance of the agenda. It's the pressure exerted by its unresolved state.

That's an important distinction.

You might want to write philosophy all day, but if your bladder is screaming, philosophy loses.

😂

The body has just performed an extraordinarily sophisticated act of agenda management.

So perhaps your “mind” isn't primarily:

What do I think?

but:

“Of everything that could be acted upon right now, what must I deal with next?”

And then we get very close to your original CAS intuition:

Intelligence = selecting the least-idiotic next action from the currently available possibilities.

That's considerably more interesting than merely saying “AI should choose good actions.”