The Universal Law of Mind (ULOM) describes mental events. Because it makes a testable statement, it is scientific.

The ULOM offers these premises:

1. Mental events are physical events.

2. Mental events are performed by mental atoms. Borrowing from Perceptual Control Theory, a single atom compares perceptions to goals and makes changes in the environment to get the two to match. Mental atoms are joined to create mental molecules. Different kinds of mental atoms create different kinds of mental molecules which create different kinds of minds.

3. Mental atoms work the same way for all types of minds. This includes the minds of humans and non-humans, living and non-living things, physically diffuse and physically coherent entities, God, and Dog (which, for a dyslexic, is the same thing).

4. Mental atoms create islands of order in the normal flow of entropy.

5. Mental atoms are about information.

6. Mental atoms are information processors and Turing Machines. .

7. The self is an interior artifact created by a special “I” atom.

8. The "I" atom arises out of conflict as an agent of intention and free will.

The ULOM is reductionist, mechanistic and dehumanizing:

• Reductionist - because complex mental systems are reduced to collections of elementary mental events.

• Mechanistic - because the minds of living and non-living devices are said to obey the same physical laws.

• Dehumanizing – see above.

The ULOM is also poetic. Although capable of being described in scientific terms, the true significance of the physical events which make up minds is not the physical events, but what they represent. Testable theories can be devised to describe mental events, but not their symbolic meaning. The observer would have to enjoy the same status with respect to the tested mind as the owner of the mind.

The ULOM does not recognize the term “artificial intelligence”. To the ULOM, it is all the same.

Copyright © 2006 Tom Weathers