Despite disagreeing with the analysis of the logical structure of the paper, I do appreciate the emphasis that Hill has placed on philosophical and ethical aspects of our attempts to construct minds. In the original article, I only very briefly touch on those issues. However, I would be quick to point out that I do not think, and never intended to suggest, that the distinction between “natural” and “artificial minds” was an absolute, “exhaustive,” or “exclusive” one (Hill this collection, p. 3). Like most interesting and complex features, possession of ‘mindedness’ no doubt comes in degrees. In fact, I think that our attempts to construct artificial minds will provide a much better sense of the dimensions along which such a continuum is best defined.
Finally, I must admit that I find it somewhat alarming that I'm being characterized as a behaviourist in Hill’s article—that has definitely never happened before: “Let us see how Eliasmith characterizes artificial minds. One can see this as a judgment based on the similarity of behaviour originating from two types of agents: humans and artificial” (this collection, p. 5). Hence, I was espousing “analytical behaviorism… a failed philosophical research program” (Hill this collection, p. 6). Indeed, I, like all behavioural scientists, believe that behaviour is one important metric for characterizing the systems of interest. However, the reason I focus on internal mechanisms in my own research – all the way down to the neural – is that I believe those mechanisms give us critical additional constraints for identifying the right class of algorithms that give rise to behaviours. Consequently, I wholeheartedly agree with Hill that “There could be much more to mindedness than behaviour” (this collection, p. 6). So, for the record, I believe that our best theories for how to build minds are going to be highly informed by low-level mechanisms.
That being said, I also think that most people’s judgments of whether or not something counts as being minded is going to come down largely to their being convinced of the naturalness, or “cognitiveness” of the behaviour that is exhibited by agents we construct. Notice that there is a difference between a claim of how people will judge mindedness, and a claim about theories of mindedness or how we ought to best achieve that judgment. Turing was, after all, onto something with his test.