The Society of Mind by Minsky (PDF)

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Marvin Minsky — one of the fathers of computer science and cofounder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT — gives a revolutionary answer to the age-old question: “How does the mind work?” Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a “society” of tiny components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter — on a self-contained page — corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amusing, and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination.

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Editorial Reviews: Amazon.com Review For some artificial intelligence researchers, Minsky’s book is too far removed from hard science to be useful. For others, the high-level approach of The Society of Mind makes it a gold mine of ideas waiting to be implemented. The author, one of the undisputed fathers of the discipline of AI, sets out to provide an abstract model of how the human mind really works. His thesis is that our minds consist of a huge aggregation of tiny mini-minds or agents that have evolved to perform highly specific tasks. Most of these agents lack the attributes we think of as intelligence and are severely limited in their ability to intercommunicate. Yet rational thought, feeling, and purposeful action result from the interaction of these basic components. Minsky’s theory does not suggest a specific implementation for building intelligent machines. Still, this book may prove to be one of the most influential for the future of AI. Review Issac Asimov Information Week 270 brilliantly original essays on…how the mind works.Douglas Hofstadter author of Gödel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas A stunning collage of staccato images, filled to the brim with witty insights and telling aphorisms.The New York Times Book Review INGENIOUS…STIMULATING…crisp, packed with quips, aphorisms and homely illustrations. A pleasure to read…It will make you think. And that’s what brains are for.Michael Crichton author to The Andromeda Strain PROVOCATIVE, DELIGHTFUL, CHALLENGING, a rich, funny and altogether fascinating book.Martin Gardner The Boston Sunday Globe SPARKLING WITH JOKES and apt quotations…and rich insights.Gene Roddenberry creator of Star Trek A REMARKABLE BOOK….I am grateful that Marvin Minsky was my tour guide on this journey in the realms of my own consciousness.San Jose Mercury News SCATTERED WITH GEMS….Liable to be influential far beyond the narrow researches of artificial intelligence.Professor Guy Cellerier Genetic Artificial Intelligence and Epistemics Laboratory, University of Geneva A PROFOUND AND FASCINATING BOOK that lays down the foundations for the solution of one of the last great problems of modern science….Marks a new era. About the Author Marvin Minsky is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has led to many advances in artificial intelligence, psychology, physical optics, mathematics, and the theory of computation. He has made major contributions in the domains of computer graphics, knowledge and semantics, machine vision, and machine learning. He has also been involved with technologies for space exploration.Professor Minsky is one of the pioneers of intelligence-based robotics. He designed and built some of the first mechanical hands with tactile sensors, visual scanners, and their software and interfaces. In 1951 he built the first neural-network learning machine. With John McCarthy he founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959. He has written seminal papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, perception, and language. His book The Society of Mind contains hundreds of ideas about the mind, many of which he has further developed in this book. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER 1PROLOGUEEverything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.Albert EinsteinThis book tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from nonintelligence? To answer that, we’ll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.I’ll call “Society of Mind” this scheme in which each mind is made of many smaller processes. These we’ll call agents. Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in societies — in certain very special ways — this leads to true intelligence.There’s nothing very technical in this book. It, too, is a society — of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of them we can explain the strangest mysteries of mind.One trouble is that these ideas have lots of cross-connections. My explanations rarely go in neat, straight lines from start to end. I wish I could have lined them up so that you could climb straight to the top, by mental stair-steps, one by one. Instead they’re tied in tangled webs.Perhaps the fault is actually mine, for failing to find a tidy base of neatly ordered principles. But I’m inclined to lay the blame upon the nature of the mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. If so, that complication can’t be helped; it’s only what we must expect from evolution’s countless tricks.What can we do when things are hard to describe? We start by sketching out the roughest shapes to serve as scaffolds for the rest; it doesn’t matter very much if some of those forms turn out partially wrong. Next, draw details to give these skeletons more lifelike flesh. Last, in the final filling-in, discard whichever first ideas no longer fit.That’s what we do in real life, with puzzles that seem very hard. It’s much the same for shattered pots as for the cogs of great machines. Until you’ve seen some of the rest, you can’t make sense of any part.1.1 THE AGENTS OF THE MINDGood theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billion years in which our brains have evolved; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of infancy and childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.To explain the mind, we have to show how minds are built from mindless stuff, from parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we’d consider smart. Unless we can explain the mind in terms of things that have no thoughts or feelings of their own, we’ll only have gone around in a circle. But what could those simpler particles be — the “agents” that compose our minds? This is the subject of our book, and knowing this, let’s see our task. There are many questions to answer.Function: How do agents work?Embodiment: What are they made of?Interaction: How do they communicate?Origins: Where do the first agents come from?Heredity: Are we all born with the same agents?Learning: How do we make new agents and change old ones?Character: What are the most important kinds of agents?Authority: What happens when agents disagree?Intention: How could such networks want or wish?Competence: How can groups of agents do what separate agents cannot do?Selfness: What gives them unity or personality?Meaning: How could they understand anything?Sensibility: How could they have feelings and emotions?Awareness: How could they be conscious or self-aware?How could a theory of the mind explain so many things, when every separate question seems too hard to answer by itself? These questions all seem difficult, indeed, when we sever each one’s connections to the other ones. But once we see the mind as a society of agents, each answer will illuminate the rest.1.2 THE MIND AND THE BRAINIt was never supposed [the poet Imlac said] that cogitation is inherent in matter, or that every particle is a thinking being. Yet if any part of matter be devoid of thought, what part can we suppose to think? Matter can differ from matter only in form, bulk, density, motion and direction of motion: to which of these, however varied or combined, can consciousness be annexed? To be round or square, to be solid or fluid, to be great or little, to be moved slowly, or swiftly one way or another, are modes of material existence, all equally alien from the nature of cogitation. If matter be once without thought, it can only be made to think by some new modification, but all the modifications which it can admit are equally unconnected with cogitative powers.Samuel JohnsonHow could solid-seeming brains support such ghostly things as thoughts? This question troubled many thinkers of the past. The world of thoughts and the world of things appeared to be too far apart to interact in any way. So long as thoughts seemed so utterly different from everything else, there seemed to be no place to start.A few centuries ago it seemed equally impossible to explain Life, because living things appeared to be so different from anything else. Plants seemed to grow from nothing. Animals could move and learn. Both could reproduce themselves — while nothing else could do such things. But then that awesome gap began to close. Every living thing was found to be composed of smaller cells, and cells turned out to be composed of complex but comprehensible chemicals. Soon it was found that plants did not create any substance at all but simply extracted most of their material from gases in the air. Mysteriously pulsing hearts turned out to be no more than mechanical pumps, composed of networks of muscle cells. But it was not until the present century that John yon Neumann showed theoretically how cell-machines could reproduce while, almost independently, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered how each cell actually makes copies of its own hereditary code. No longer does an educated person have to seek any special, vital force to animate each living thing.Similarly, a century ago, we had essentially no way to start to explain how thinking works. Then psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget produced their theories about child development. Somewhat later, on the mechanical side, mathematicians like Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing began to reveal the hitherto unknown range of what machines could be made to do. These two streams of thought began to merge only in the 1940s, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts began to show how machines might be made to see, reason, and remember. Research in the modern science of Artificial Intelligence started only in the 1950s, stimulated by the invention of modern computers. This inspired a flood of new ideas about how machines could do what only minds had done previously.Most people still believe that no machine could ever be conscious, or feel ambition, jealousy, humor, or have any other mental life-experience. To be sure, we are still far from being able to create machines that do all the things people do. But this only means that we need better theories about how thinking works. This book will show how the tiny machines that we’ll call “agents of the mind” could be the long sought “particles” that those theories need.1.3 THE SOCIETY OF MINDYou know that everything you think and do is thought and done by you. But what’s a “you”? What kinds of smaller entities cooperate inside your mind to do your work? To start to see how minds are like societies, try this: pick up a cup of tea!Your GRASPING agents want to keep hold of the cup.Your BALANCING agents want to keep the tea from spilling out.Your THIRST agents want you to drink the tea.Your MOVING agents want to get the cup to your lips.Yet none of these consume your mind as you roam about the room talking to your friends. You scarcely think at all about Balance; Balance has no concern with Grasp; Grasp has no interest in Thirst; and Thirst is not involved with your social problems. Why not? Because they can depend on one another. If each does its own little job, the really big job will get done by all of them together: drinking tea.How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be at least a hundred of them, just to shape your wrist and palm and hand. Another thousand muscle systems must work to manage all the moving bones and joints that make your body walk around. And to keep everything in balance, each of those processes has to communicate with some of the others. What if you stumble and start to fall? Then many other processes quickly try to get things straight. Some of them are concerned with how you lean and where you place your feet. Others are occupied with what to do about the tea: you wouldn’t want to burn your own hand, but neither would you want to scald someone else. You need ways to make quick decisions.All this happens while you talk, and none of it appears to need much thought. But when you come to think of it, neither does your talk itself. What kinds of agents choose your words so that you can express the things you mean? How do those words get arranged into phrases and sentences, each connected to the next? What agencies inside your mind keep track of all the things you’ve said — and, also, whom you’ve said them to? How foolish it can make you feel when you repeat — unless you’re sure your audience is new.We’re always doing several things at once, like planning and walking and talking, and this all seems so natural that we take it for granted. But these processes actually involve more machinery than anyone can understand all at once. So, in the next few sections of this book, we’ll focus on just one ordinary activity — making things with children’s building-blocks. First we’ll break this process into smaller parts, and then we’ll see how each of them relates to all the other parts.In doing this, we’ll try to imitate how Galileo and Newton learned so much by studying the simplest kinds of pendulums and weights, mirrors and prisms. Our study of how to build with blocks will be like focusing a microscope on the simplest objects we can find, to open up a great and unexpected universe. It is the same reason why so many biologists today devote more attention to tiny germs and viruses than to magnificent lions and tigers. For me and a whole generation of students, the world of work with children’s blocks has been the prism and the pendulum for studying intelligence.In science, one can learn the most by studying what seems the least.1.4 THE WORLD OF BLOCKSImagine a child playing with blocks, and imagine that this child’s mind contains a host of smaller minds. Call them mental agents. Right now, an agent called Builder is in control. Builder’s specialty, is making towers from blocks.Our child likes to watch a tower grow as each new block is placed on top. But building a tower is too complicated a job for any single, simple agent, so Builder has to ask for help from several other agents:In fact, even to find another block and place it on the tower top is too big for a job for any single agent. So Add, in turn, must call for other agents’ help. Before we’re done, we’ll need more agents than would fit in any diagram.Why break things into such small parts? Because minds, like towers, are made that way — except that they’re composed of processes instead of blocks. And if making stacks of blocks seems insignificant — remember that you didn’t always feel that way. When first you found some building toys in early childhood, you probably spent joyful weeks of learning what to do with them. If such toys now seem relatively dull, then you must ask yourself how you have changed. Before you turned to more ambitious things, it once seemed strange and wonderful to be able to build a tower or a house of blocks. Yet, though all grown-up persons know how to do such things, no one understands how we learn to do them! And that is what will concern us here. To pile up blocks into heaps and rows: these are skills each of us learned so long ago that we can’t remember learning them at all. Now they seem mere common sense — and that’s what makes psychology hard. This forgetfulness, the amnesia of infancy, makes us assume that all our wonderful abilities were always there inside our minds, and we never stop to ask ourselves how they began and grew.1.5 COMMON SENSEYou cannot think about thinking, without thinking about thinking about something.Seymour PapertWe found a way to make our tower builder out of parts. But Builder is really far from done. To build a simple stack of blocks, our child’s agents must accomplish all these other things.See must recognize its blocks, whatever their color, size, and place — in spite of different backgrounds, shades, and lights, and even when they’re partially obscured by other things.Then, once that’s done, Move has to guide the arm and hand through complicated paths in space, yet never strike the tower’s top or hit the child’s face.And think how foolish it would seem, if Find were to see, and Grasp were to grasp, a block supporting the tower top!When we look closely at these requirements, we find a bewildering world of complicated questions. For example, how could Find determine which blocks are still available for use? It would have to “understand” the scene in terms of what it is trying to do. This means that we’ll need theories both about what it means to understand and about how a machine could have a goal. Consider all the practical judgments that an actual Builder would have to make. It would have to decide whether there are enough blocks to accomplish its goal and whether they are strong and wide enough to support the others that will be placed on them.What if the tower starts to sway? A real builder must guess the cause. It is because some joint inside the column isn’t square enough? Is the foundation insecure, or is the tower too tall for its width? Perhaps it is only because the last block was placed too roughly.All children learn about such things, but we rarely ever think about them in our later years. By the time we are adults we regard all of this to be simple “common sense.” But that deceptive pair of words conceals almost countless different skills.Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas — of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.If common sense is so diverse and intricate, what makes it seem so obvious and natural? This illusion of simplicity comes from losing touch with what happened during infancy, when we formed our first abilities. As each new group of skills matures, we build more layers on top of them. As time goes on, the layers below become increasingly remote until, when we try to speak of them in later life, we find ourselves with little more to say than “I don’t know.”1.6 AGENTS AND AGENCIESWe want to explain intelligence as a combination of simpler things. This means that we must be sure to check, at every step, that none of our agents is, itself, intelligent. Otherwise, our theory would end up resembling the nineteenth-century “chessplaying machine” that was exposed by Edgar Allan Poe to actually conceal a human dwarf inside. Accordingly, whenever we find that an agent has to do anything complicated, we’ll replace it with a subsociety of agents that do simpler things. Because of this, the reader must be prepared to feel a certain sense of loss. When we break things down to their smallest parts, they’ll each seem dry as dust at first, as though some essence has been lost.For example, we’ve seen how to construct a tower-building skill by making Builder from little parts like Find and Get. Now, where does its “knowing-how-to-build” reside when, clearly, it is not in any part — and yet those parts are all that Builder is? The answer: It is not enough to explain only what each separate agent does. We must also understand how those parts are interrelated — that is, how groups of agents can accomplish things.Accordingly, each step in this book uses two different ways to think about agents. If you were to watch Builder work, from the outside, with no idea of how it works inside, you’d have the impression that it knows how to build towers. But if you could see Builder from the inside, you’d surely find no knowledge there. You would see nothing more than a few switches, arranged in various ways to turn each other on and off. Does Builder “really know” how to build towers? The answer depends on how you look at it. Let’s use two different words, “agent” and “agency,” to say why Builder seems to lead a double life. As agency, it seems to know its job. As agent, it cannot know anything at all.When you drive a car, you regard the steering wheel as an agency that you can use to change the car’s direction. You don’t care how it works. But when something goes wrong with the steering, and you want to understand what’s happening, it’s better to regard the steering wheel as just one agent in a larger agency: it turns a shaft that turns a gear to pull a rod that shifts the axle of a wheel. Of course, one doesn’t always want to take this microscopic view; if you kept all those details in mind while driving, you might crash because it took too long to figure out which way to turn the wheel. Knowing how is not the same as knowing why. In this book, we’ll always be switching between agents and agencies because, depending on our purposes, we’ll have to use different viewpoints and kinds of descriptions.Copyright © 1985, 1986 by Marvin Minsky Read more

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⭐Marvin Lee Minsky (1927-2016) was an American cognitive scientist and author who was the co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory. He wrote in the Prologue to this 1986 book, “This book tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from nonintelligence? To answer that, we’ll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself. I’ll call ‘Society of Mind’ this scheme in which each mind is made of many smaller processes. These we’ll call ‘agents.’ Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in society—in certain very special ways—this leads to true intelligence. There’s nothing very technical in this book. It, too, is a society—of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of THEM we can explain the strangest mysteries of mind.” (Pg. 17)He notes, “Most people still believe that no machine could ever be conscious, or feel ambition, jealousy, humor, or have any other mental life-experience. To be sure, we are still far from being able to create machines that do all the things people do. But this only means that we need better theories about how thinking world. This book will show how the tiny machines that we’ll call ‘agents of the mind’ could be the long sought ‘particles’ that those theories need.” (Pg. 19)He states, “It is foolish to use these words [‘life’ and ‘mind’] for describing the smallest components of living things because these words were invented to describe how larger assemblies interact… words like ‘living’ and ‘thinking’ are useful for describing phenomena that result from certain combinations of relationships… In fact, the word ‘life’ has already lost most of its mystery—at lest for modern biologists, because they understand so many of the important interactions among the chemicals in cells. But MIND still holds its mystery—because we still know so little about how mental agents interact to accomplish all the things they do.” (Pg. 28)He says, “But if there is no single, central, Self inside the mind, what makes us feel so sure that one exists? What gives that myth its fore and strength? A paradox: perhaps its BECAUSE there are no persons in our heads to make us do the things we want—not even ones to make us want to WANT—that we construct the myth that WE’RE inside ourselves.” (Pg. 40)He includes a diagram that “depicts our sensory machinery as sending information to the brain, wherein it is projected on some inner mental screen… a lurking Self observes the scene and then considers what to do. Finally, that Self may act… to influence the real world by sending various signals back through yet another family of remote-control accessories. This concept simply doesn’t work. It cannot help for you to think that inside yourself lies someone else who does your work. This … inner Self requires yet another movie screen inside itself, on which to project what it has seen!… The idea of a single, central Self doesn’t explain anything. This is because a thing with no parts provides nothing that we can use as pieces of explanation! Then why do we so often embrace the strange idea that what we do is done by Someone Else—that is, our Self? Because so much of what our minds to is hidden from the parts of us that are involved with verbal consciousness.” (Pg. 50)He explains, “Why do our mental processes so often seem to flow in ‘streams of consciousness’? Perhaps because, in order to keep control, we have to simplify how we represent what’s happening. Then, when that complicated mental scene is ‘straightened out,’ it seems as though a single pipeline of ideas were flowing through the mind. These are all compelling reasons why it helps to see ourselves as singletons. Still, each of us must also learn not only that different people have their own identities, but that the same person can entertain different beliefs, plans, and dispositions at the same time. For finding good ideas about psychology, the single-agent image has become a grave impediment. To comprehend the human mind is surely one of the hardest tasks any mind can face. The legend of the single Self can only divert us from the target of that inquiry.” (Pg. 51)He argues, “Many people seem absolutely certain that no computer could ever be sentient, conscious, self-willed, or in any other way ‘aware’ of itself. But what makes everyone so sure that they themselves possess those admirable qualities? It’s true that if we’re aware of anything at all, it is that ‘I’m aware—hence I’m aware.’ Yet what do such convictions really mean?… Indeed, the evidence that we are self-aware—that is, that we have any special aptitude for finding out what’s happening inside ourselves—is very weak indeed… Most of the understandings we call ‘insights’ are merely variants of our other ways to ‘figure out’ what’s happening.” (Pg. 63)He observes, “another branch of Artificial Intelligence research has sought to find ways to embody knowledge is machines. But this problem itself has several parts: we must discover now to acquire the knowledge we need, we must learn how to represent it, and, finally, we must develop processes that can exploit our knowledge effectively. To accomplish all that, our memories must represent … only those relationships that may help us to reach our goals… A curious phenomenon emerged from this research. It often turned out easier to program machines to solve specialized problems … such as playing chess… then to make machines do things that most people considered easy—such as building toy houses with children’s blocks. This is why I’ve emphasized so many ‘easy’ problems in this book.” (Pg. 74)He notes, “We often talk as though we ought to be controlled by what we want… It seems so natural to want what we like and to avoid what we don’t like that we sometimes feel a sense of unnatural horror when another person appears to violate that rule, when we think, ‘They surely wouldn’t do such things unless, deep down, they really wanted to. It is as though we feel that people OUGHT to want only to do the things they like to do. But the relation between wanting and liking is not simple at all, because our preferences are the end products of so many negotiations among our agencies. To accomplish any substantial goal, we must renounce the other possibilities … then we use words like ‘liking’ to express the operation of the mechanisms that hold us to our choice. Liking’s job… [is that] it narrows down our universe… it does not reflect what liking IS but only shows what liking DOES.” (Pg. 94)He points out, “What people call ‘meanings’ do not usually correspond to particular and definite structures, but to connections among and across fragments of the great interlocking networks fo connections and constraints among our agencies. Because these networks are constantly growing and changing, meanings are rarely sharp, and we cannot always expect to be able to ‘define’ them in terms of compact sequences of words. Verbal explanations serve only as partial hints; we also have to learn from watching, working, playing—and thinking.” (Pg. 131)He asserts, “When people ask, ‘Could a machine ever be conscious?’ I’m often tempted to ask back, ‘Could a person ever be conscious?’ I mean this as a serous reply, because we seem so ill equipped to understand ourselves… However, we can design new machines as we wish, and provide them with better ways to keep and examine records of their own activities—and this means that machines are potentially capable of far more consciousness than we are. To be sure… until we can design more sensible machines, such knowledge might only help them find more ways to fail: the easier to change themselves, the easier to wreck themselves—until they learn to train themselves. Fortunately, we can leave this problem to the designers of the future, who surely would not build such things unless they found good reason to.” (Pg. 160)He notes, “One’s present personality cannot share many of the thoughts of all one’s older personalities—and yet it has come sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self—a sort of ever-present friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help.” (Pg. 174)He states, “As for brain science, no one ever before tried to study machines with billions of working parts. This would be difficult enough, even if we knew exactly how each part worked, and our present-day technology does not yet allow us to study the brain cells of higher animals while they’re actually working and learning… These problems will all be solved once we have better instruments and better theories… There is not the slightest reason to doubt the brains are anything other than machines with enormous numbers of parts that work in perfect accord with physical laws. As far as anyone can tell, our minds are merely complex processes. The serious problems come from our having had so little experience with machines of such complexity that we are not yet prepared to think effectively about them.” (Pg. 288)He argues, “what would happen if we asked Mary to speak … about her mental model of herself… Do people go on to make models of their models of themselves? If we kept on doing things like that, we’d get trapped in an infinite regress… And the same thing happens whenever we try to probe into our own motivations by continually repeating, ‘What was my motive for wanting THAT?’ Eventually , we simply stop and say, ‘Because I simply wanted to.’ The same when we find things hard to decide: we can simply say, ‘I just decide,’ and this can help us interrupt what otherwise might be an endless chain of reasoning.” (Pg. 305)He acknowledges, “No matter that the physical world provides no room for freedom of will: that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. We’re virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it’s false—except, of course, when we’re inspired to find the flaws in ALL our beliefs, whatever may be the consequence to cheerfulness and mental peace,” (Pg. 307)He concludes, “This book assumes that any brain, machine, or other thing that has a mind must be composed of smaller things that cannot think at all… To assemble the overview suggested in this book, I had to make literally hundreds of assumptions… until we have a more coherent framework for psychology, it will remain too early for the task of weeding out unproved hypotheses or for trying to show that one theory is better than another… Since most of the statements in this book are speculations, it would have been too tedious to mention this on every page…” (Pg. 322-323)This book will be of great interest to those studying Artificial Intelligence, and related topics.

⭐”Society of Mind” is what Marvin Minsky calls the apparatus created from the myriad (and myriad tiered) sets of robotic yes-no hot-cold now-later kinds of decisions that take place when we’re hit by external stimuli. The brain, our “intelligence” (not in Minsky’s terms) is the way that these non-intelligent, non-aware processes have evolved in such a way that the entire structure that they are a part of (you, the organism, are a part of) could persist the longest period of time. In other words, it’s not so much that a controlling, guiding central-core has evolved that keeps these lower level entities in line, rather, entirely the opposite! When you are confronted with problem of controlling robotic, unintelligent devices, the key control necessary is to make it extremely difficult for ANY ONE process to gain control, because if it does, and it’s decision is a mistake, you might jump over the cliff.You have to understand that, for Minsky, explaining intelligence is meaningless if you cannot show a line of cookie crumbs leading from the “intelligent” behavior to a set of un-intelligent (A-B, HOT-COLD, etc.) set of processes that created it. Clearly, if you cannot do that, you have made a circular argument.

⭐I had the honor of being handed this book in manuscript form by Professor Minsky back in my early days as an editor at Addison Wesley. I tried but failed to get them to publish it. “Too weird.” “Not really a textbook.” Yep. Right on both counts, and yet…And yet the book survives (is still in print) today. Addison-Wesley, however, is long “out of print.”Each page is its own discrete article. There are 270 of them. Minsky, in structuring his book this way, uses form to reinforce his ideas about function: The mind is not one big thing; rather it is a collection of small, independent agents, none of which possesses intelligence on its own, that – all working together – create The Society of Mind.

⭐This isn’t so much a book as it is a collection of essays. Each essay brings up a different idea of how the human brain completes tasks, however small they are. Each thing we do (breathe, walk, talk) is carried out by small actors in our brain, and those actors are controlled by even smaller processes and yadda yadda. It’s hard to explain what this book talks about, you have to really study it. I’ve only read it once through, and I probably need to read it again to fully understand the big concepts.But what I like about it is it’s easy to walk away from for a while and pick it back up again. The essays are each only a few pages, so you can just read one a week, dwell on it, then read the next essay. It’s a strange book, I wish I knew of more like it.

⭐The book kind of reads like a series of short essays. Each is like a little important part that adds up to the whole. Most of it revolves around the idea of the mind consisting of agents that execute functions, much like a computer processor executing functions which obviously the author is inspired from. The beauty is in the simplicity. Though there are a lot of chapters, each one is really simple but you can see how they can add up in a more than the sum of the parts, kind of way.

⭐I work in virtual human technology and Minsky has long been an inspiration. I can’t just sit down and read this stuff through, I have to think about it in chunks. Society of Mind suggests some operational views of the mind that can be helpful in designing thinking machines. I don’t always agree with him and sometimes he’s not the easiest guy to read, but overall this book is a must read for any one interested in how the mind may work and how to emulate it with Natural Language/artificial Intelligence engines.

⭐A splendid general account of many of the issues in AI, mostly from a philosophical perspective and written by an early pioneer of the field, the great Marvin Minsky. Its breadth is astonishing and should be regarded as a landmark of its time.

⭐A very enjoyable read. Minsky’s ideas are very clear. Whether this approach is what achieves general AI or not, I don’t know.Minsky will be missed. If it is true that on death he was cryogenically frozen, perhaps there’s a chance we might hear from him again.Highly recommend this book.

⭐This book is amazing. It combines developmental/child psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, theory of knowledge and all sorts of other things in something that appears truly timeless and wise, in so many ways. Every page of this book is a key and inspiration to enjoying really substantial challenges.

⭐Marvin Minsky is a legend. This book has one chapter per page where Minsky talks about different areas of Cognitive intelligence. How do we resolve conflicts, how memory works. His K Lines concept is questioned by a lot of scientists but I feel the concept is pretty much on the right track.This is book is more than a decade old now but still one of the best one available. It is interesting to see how Minsky hops between Artificial Intelligence, Psychology and Spirituality (in a scientific sense, not a religious one). His ideas on what being “Self Aware” means make you pause and rethink if that is how you make decisions.If you have the intellectual hunger to know more about your mind, this is a must read.

⭐Society Of Mind de Minsky sert un peu de base au développement de l’intelligence artificielle et des systèmes multi-agents mais pas seulement. On en apprend énormément sur nous-mêmes, notre façon de penser et d’interagir avec les autres. Il est décomposé en “petites nouvelles” toutes différentes et toutes liées. On y apprend comment décomposer un problème complexes en petites parties jusqu’a obtenir un ensemble de tâches unitaires simples. Que vous soyez intéressé par l’intelligence artificielle ou simplement curieux d’étudier les interactions humaines, ce livre est à lire.

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