- Duration
- 6 min
- Concepts
- MindConsciousnessIntentionality
The Mind Detector
What are you actually measuring when you decide something has a mind?
Choose which kinds of evidence count for the presence of a mind. Then watch how the verdict shifts across a child, an octopus, a language model, a corporation and a thermostat — and what it reveals about your criteria.
The experiment
Turing’s 1950 proposal was a test of behaviour: if an interrogator cannot tell the machine from the person, the question “can machines think?” is to be replaced by “can machines pass?” Seventy years on, systems pass with ease, and the question has not gone away. Something in the test was measuring the judge.
This experiment makes that explicit. You are the judge. Decide how much each kind of evidence — fluent language, flexible behaviour, a body, a history, a nervous system, the ability to suffer — should count. The instrument then scores five candidates according to your criteria.
What to notice. No weighting produces a ranking everyone accepts. Weight language and the model outscores the octopus. Weight the body and the corporation vanishes. The verdict is downstream of a theory of mind you may not know you hold.
Other instruments
Ship of Theseus, Digital
At what point in a gradual replacement do you stop being you?
Run experimentThe Epistemic Chain
Where does responsibility for a belief live when it arrives through a machine?
Run experimentAgency Without Consciousness
Can something act for reasons with no one home?
Run experiment