Mind Shapes: A Mind Model to Inform AI Development

Steven Vetter, who has presented to both our Tuesday and Saturday meetups, is going to present on a model of how the human brain works, described by Alan Kahn in his book “Mind Shapes”, and tie it back to a new approach to AI.

In this model, we have 16 distinct ways of problem solving that he refers to as transitions. Each has it’s own knowledge base that it taps. However, only one of these transitions is accessible to our consciousness, and two others are partially accessible.

Different people have different conscious transitions, which has major implications for how they communicate as well as how they solve problems. However, all 16 work together to give us the full range of our intellectual capabilities.

If one views the 16 transitions of Mind Shapes, as agents specializing in different subsets of problems, this model has remarkable parallels with a decentralized approach to AI that Steve will also briefly discuss.