The Society of Mind

1
The Society of Mind

• Marvin Minsky

2
The Agents of the Mind

• Theories of the mind must span at least three
  different scales of time slow, fast and in
  between.
• A singular theory must also answer many questions
  about the workings of the mind, much as function,
  origins, heredity, and character.

3
The Mind and the Brain

• The evolution of science has greatly focused
  questions of the mind.
• Science has moved from explaining the basic
  tenets of life to using machines to emulate
  intelligence.

• The mind can integrate many small actions into
  one simple, large action.
• This is very similar to the box exercise in the
  beginning of the class.

4
Blocks

• Making towers from blocks
• Choose a place to start the tower.
• Add a new block to the tower.
• Decide whether it is high enough.
• Adding a block
• First ADD must FIND a new block.
• Then the hand must GET that block and PUT it on
  the tower top.
• Commands must be broken into their smallest
  elements.

5
Common Sense

• All knowledge starts from smaller, simpler parts.
• These parts become so integral to life that they
  become extremely obscure and difficult to
  describe.

6
Agents

• Agents are simple processes that turn other
  agents on and off.
• They accomplish all that their subagents
  accomplish.

7
Bureaucracy

• Simple agents must be placed into a bureaucracy
  to create a useful product.
• An agent Builder would then point to a begin,
  add, and end, each of which have their own
  sub-agents arranged in a bureaucracy.

8

• Novelists
• Creates new hypotheses.
• Are more responsible for new innovations and
  radical concepts.

• Reductionists
• Build on old ideas.
• Reductionists use these ideas to expand their
  science further.
• Their ideas are more conservative and more likely
  to be correct.

9
Parts and Wholes

• Certain wholes are more than the sum of their
  parts.
• The phrase is often used when things combines in
  unexplainable ways.

• For life and mind, only the whole has any
  value.
• Individual parts of a body contain no life
  individual parts of a brain contain no mind.

10
Easy Things are Hard

• In the 1960s, MIT built a simple robot hand that
  communicated with a camera to build with
  childrens blocks.
• It took years to create Move, See, Grasp, etc.
  functions.

• It becomes extremely difficult to correctly
  coordinate separate parts of a machine.
• In general, were least aware of what our minds
  do best.

11
Are People Machines?

• Human activities can be broken down into small,
  simple actions.
• It may be that humans are only highly complicated
  machines with billions of parts.