In this section, I intend to sketch some important issues and questions for the future debate on artificial minds. I shall examine whether predictions on the concept of artificial minds can be made at the present state of the debate and based on the empirical data we currently have. This involves knowledge about what a mind is, and knowledge about how an artificial mind is characterized. In reconstructing Eliasmith’s understanding of what a mind is, we may find the following statement informative: he relies on behavioral, theoretical, and similarity-based methods (this collection, p. 3). The possible problem with this approach is that the characterization of the methods is very limited. To point to some relevant questions: what is the behavior of a mind? What about the fact that mind is not even close to being well understood theoretically? How do similarity-based methods avoid drawing problematic conclusions from analogies (cf. Wild 2012)? Importantly, at this point we are only talking about natural, biologically-grounded minds. Answers as to what an artificial mind is supposed to be might exceed the concept of mind in ways we are unable to tell at the present moment.
Let us see how Eliasmith characterizes artificial minds. One can see this as a judgment based on the similarity of behavior originating from two types of agents: humans and artificial. Functions need to be developed that are necessary for building an artificial mind. These functions lead to a certain kind of behavior. This behavior is achieved by perceptive, motor, and cognitive skills, which are needed to make the behavior seem human-like. Thus, the functions implemented on sophisticated kinds of technology will, in the end, lead to human-like behavior (Eliasmith this collection, p. 9). The reason why the argumentative step from cognition, perception, and motor skills to mindedness can be made is the underlying assumption that the behavior resulting from these three types of skills is convincing behavior in our eyes (Eliasmith this collection, p. 10). Similarity judgments, so Eliasmith argues, might appear “hand-wavy”. Still, he uses them to reduce the complexity that mindedness brings with it (ibid., pp. 5–6), and he certainly succeeds in drawing attention to a whole range of important issues. However, it could well be that the reduction to human-like behavior as the benchmark for assessing mindedness is too simple. After all, analytical behaviorism today counts as a failed philosophical research program. There could be much more to mindedness than behavior. We just do not know what this is yet. As a possible candidate we might consider the previously mentioned psychological make-up of artificial agents, such as their being endowed with internal states like ours. One might think of robust first-person perspectives, but also about emotions like pain, disappointment, happiness, fear, and the ability to react to these. Other options include interoceptive awareness or the ability to interact socially—and much more.