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TopFirst, we present related work to the space of minds. When we reason about minds we tend to think of human minds only. This is because of the anthropomorphic bias. However, in addition, there are other minds, which we encounter on earth, the minds of higher order animals, and then there are various minds, which we can imagine as possibility and perhaps even more beyond our imagination (“unknown unknowns”). Several theoretical surveys on this topic exist and it has been shown that the space of possible minds is vast (e.g. Sloman, 1984; Goertzel, 2006; Hall, 2007; Yudkowsky, 2008; Yampolskiy, 2015).
Examples for potential minds could be human-designed AI minds, self-improving minds, a combination of minds constituting itself a mind and many more. There have been several attempts to classify the space of minds (Yampolskiy, 2015). In fact, the space of human minds forms only a tiny subset within the universe of possible minds (Yudkowsky, 2008). The space of possible minds can be considered as the set of possible cognitive algorithms. Based on this and on the limited number of cognitive algorithms, which human minds can potentially perform, it can be concluded that the majority of possible minds is more intelligent than human minds. Yampolskiy and Fox describe this insight as another example of a Copernican Revolution, i.e. a revision of the view that humanity is central, which in this case refers to minds (Yampolskiy & Fox, 2012).