The Emotion Machine; Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

by Marvin Minsky

• ISBN13: 9780743276634
• ISBN10: 0743276639
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-07
• Publisher: SIMON & SCHUSTER INC

Summary

Our minds are working all the time, but we rarely stop to think about how they work. The human mind has many different ways to think, says Marvin Minsky, the leading figure in artificial intelligence and computer science. We use these different ways of th

Author Biography

Marvin Minsky is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Falling In Love

Attachments And Goals

From Pain To Suffering

Consciousness

Levels Of Mental Activities

Common Sense

Thinking

Resourcefulness

The Self Acknowledgments

Notes Bibliography

Index

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Introduction Nora Joyce, to her husband James:"Why don't you write books people can read?" I hope this book will be useful to everyone who seeks ideas about how human minds might work, or who wants suggestions about better ways to think, or who aims toward building smarter machines. It should be useful to readers who want to learn about the field of Artificial Intelligence. It should also be of interest to psychologists, neurologists, computer scientists, and philosophers because it develops many new ideas about the subjects those specialists struggle with. We all admire great accomplishments in the sciences, arts, and humanities -- but we rarely acknowledge how much we achieve in the course of our everyday lives. We recognize the things we see, we understand the words we hear, and we remember things that we've experienced so that, later, we can apply what we've learned to other kinds of problems and opportunities. We also do a remarkable thing that no other creatures seem able to do: whenever our usual ways to think fail,we can start to think about our thoughts themselves-- and if this "reflective thinking" shows where we went wrong, that can help us to invent new and more powerful ways to think. However, we still know very little about how our brains manage to do such things. How does imagination work? What are the causes of consciousness? What are emotions, feelings, and thoughts? How do we manage to think at all? Contrast this with the progress we've seen toward answering questions about physical things. What are solids, liquids, and gases? What are colors, sounds, and temperatures? What are forces, stresses, and strains? What is the nature of energy? Today, almost all such mysteries have been explained in terms of very small numbers of simple laws -- for example, the equations discovered by such physicists as Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and SchrOdinger. So naturally, psychologists tried to imitate physicists -- by searching for compact sets of laws to explain what happens inside our brains. However, no such simple set of laws exists, because every brain has hundreds of parts, each of which evolved to do certain particular kinds of jobs; some of them recognize situations, others tell muscles to execute actions, others formulate goals and plans, and yet others accumulate and use enormous bodies of knowledge. And though we don't yet know enough about how each of those brain-centers works, we do know their construction is based on information that is contained in tens of thousands of inherited genes, so that each brain-part works in a way that depends on a somewhat different set of laws. Once we recognize that our brains contain such complicated machinery, this suggests that we need to do the opposite of what those physicists did: instead of searching for simple explanations, we need to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events. The meanings of words like "feelings," "emotions," or "consciousness" seem so natural, clear, and direct to us that we cannot see how to start thinking about them. However, this book will argue that none of those popular psychology words refers to any single, definite process; instead each of those words attempts to describe the effects of large networks of processes inside our brains. For example, Chapter 4 will demonstrate that "consciousness" refers to more than twenty different such processes! It might appear to make everything worse, to change some things that looked simple at first into problems that now seem more difficult. However, on a larger scale, this increase in complexity will actually make our job easier. For, once we split each old mystery into parts, we will have replaced each old, big problem with several new and smaller ones -- each of which may still be hard but no longer will seem unsolvable. Furthermore, Chapter 9 will argue that regarding ourselve