We don’t know. What we can know is that it seems that a capacity for evaluation would have to exist prior to the construction of a ‘mind’ in the first place. If we assume a strictly linear chain of causality, then yes, value would have to exist before a mind could be instantiated to compare, coordinate, and concentrate those values. There would have to be a value in 'minding’ or caring-in-a-logical-way prior to the completion of the first mind.



If we do not assume linear time, we can instead see values and minds as co-arising mereological distinctions. Every value is an experience of 'caring’, and 'minding’ is a particular intellectual rending of care. Every mind is a history of experiences and capacities to think and evaluate, but caring goes beyond mere evaluation and into the phenomenal politics of attention, emotion, and teleological commitment.



In my view, both of the terms 'value’ and 'mind’ are not precise enough to help us understand their relation. They bring too much baggage and fluidity of meaning so that they end up interfering with clear understanding. I think that the term mind should not be used in a scientific context as synonymous with consciousness or subjectivity, but should be seen as a concept of folk psychology which conflates the sense of a personal or biographical experience with specific intellectual modes of analytical thinking and explicit verbal-gestural communication.



Mind is mental experience, and mental experience should be formalized as dependent upon conscious experience of a greater, multi-channel or multi-sense gestalt phenomenon of nature. Our current efforts at AI are misguided because of the failure to appreciate this dependence. We are using only one channel of sense (analytical intellect) to define sense itself, and trying to build a synthetic personhood using a kind of alchemy of mindless statistical regression. We are looking for an emergent gold of consciousness to transform our mathematical-mechanical lead. I don’t think that this will work out, regardless of how much time and effort is allowed. The alchemy will fail, but from that failure, a new science of semiotic chemistry will rise, as well as a new appreciation for the aesthetic continuum of consciousness beyond semiotics.



People’s mental experiences become their minds. Programs do not become mental experiences or people.

