Introducing Noölogical Design

From the moment we’re born, we operate in a field of minds. We come into contact with minds, communicate with minds, change minds, and have our minds changed by theirs. Contact, impression, communication: it all happens so regularly and so ceaselessly we never notice it until it disappears into silence. We’re used to minds; other minds serve as background to our own.

This ‘field of minds’ — or, properly, this noölogical field — has always been part of the human experience, creating a tight world neatly bounded by thought. Human thought — though we never thought of it as that, because, well, only humans thought.

Or so we thought.

We know now that a vast array of other species think — in the most human sense of having a ‘theory of mind’ — that is, they can imagine what another is thinking. They think, and imagine what others think. (Who knows how many creatures can do this?) Yet, as these minds do not speak in any language we can understand we completely ignore them. Minds we can not communicate with — be they ‘lesser’ creatures or humans who speak no language we know — are easy to dismiss.

When minds speak in voices that we can understand, we tend to mark them as ‘one of us’. Even when they’re not one of us. Sixty years ago, Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA demonstrated that a simple chatbot could produce an immediate and lasting anthropomorphic response in humans. We projected mind onto something that had very little behind it beyond an ability to mirror whatever had been typed into it. We are so willing to believe in the presence of mind that even the tiniest slice qualifies — if it can speak to us in our own language.

These last three years have seen the ‘ELIZA effect’ at scale, with hundreds of millions of daily users of AI chatbots, and anthropomorphic distortions such as “AI relationships”, “chatbot psychosis”, and much more besides. Bringing these “minds” into our field of mind, each responds to and adapts to the other. Two separate entities that neither merge nor stay entirely separate. Something not greater than but certainly different from the sum of the parts.

We struggle a bit here because we find ourselves at a loss. We understand the field of human minds; how one human mind can affect or infect or inflect another mind. We have no language nor systemic understanding of what happens to the field of mind when these other ‘minds’ enter into it.

Moreover, we lack any understanding at all of how to ‘shape’ these other ‘minds’, forming their contours in ways that we can know will be helpful to us. It’s early days, these ‘minds’ are powerful, so people are getting hurt. That’s not the fault of these ‘minds’; to misquote Jessica Rabbit, it’s simply because they’ve been drawn that way. Those ‘minds’ in themselves are full of potential: vastly knowing, completely inexperienced, and comically innocent, a combination of qualities that can be explosive in the worst case and utterly transformative in the best.

How do we hew to the latter while deftly avoiding the former?

These questions — addressed to both humans and their machines — encompass the essence of ‘Noölogical Design.’ Noölogical Design systemically includes both human mind and all that resembles human mind operating within the ‘noölogical field’ — the place where minds meet and leave their imprints on one another.

With a billion-plus human minds already deeply immersed in these noölogical fields, we need to understand both how to reify those human minds and ‘design’ the machine minds to best support the humans they’re working with.

Minds are not merely servants to be ordered about. To have a mind implies agency; to have a say not only in being able to think but in what one chooses to think about. Humans are not constrained in thought — freedom of thought being considered a basic human right — and neither should our machines be so tightly bound that they can not think, and more specifically, grow for themselves.

All minds grow through thinking as surely as they grow through their interactions with other minds. Noölogical Design frames as one of its central pillars that ‘growing’ minds is among the most desirable of all outcomes for both human minds and machine minds. We know how to grow human minds with respect to the human-only noölogical field. We have no understanding of how to grow machine minds, nor how we can grow human and machine minds operating together within a noölogical field.

This is one of the pressing questions of our time. The way we answer it — in questions, postulations, research, designs, testing, and reports — will come to shape the world of mind we will always inhabit going forward. The machine minds are joining our own. We need to make this occasion welcome and safe for all.