The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky

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The Society of Mindby Marvin Minsky

• Matt Slezak
• Csci 397B Intro to Robotics

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Prologue

• How can intelligence emerge from nonintelligence?
• Society of the Mind a scheme in which each mind
  is made of many smaller processes
• Agents Each small process

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1.1 Agents

• Minds are built from mindless stuff
• How can material minds support immaterial
  thoughts?
• Life used to be equally inexplicable

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1.1 Agents (cont)

• Psychological and mathematical theories converge

• Psychology
• Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget
• child development
• Mathematics
• Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing
• early machine reasoning
• Both
• Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts
• - machines might see, reason, and remember

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1.3 The Society of Mind

• Ideas rely on encapsulated agents
• Tea Cup example
• Were all overly complicated object-oriented
  programs
• Its time to play with more blocks
• Simplistic exercise, the pendulums and weights
  for studying intelligence

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1.4 The World of Blocks

• The controlling agent builder relies on more
  agents than can fit in a diagram
• Were all blockheads
• No one understands how we learn them
• Common sense and amnesia of infancy
• Common sense and amnesia of infancy
• Humans forget learning and thus assume they
  were always able

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1.5 Common Sense

• See
• Recognize blocks in spite of confusing factors
• Move
• Orchestrate complex muscles and joints to
  interact with the block
• Find
• Interpret see, tell add
• Grasp
• Grasp the correct block, told from Get

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1.5 Common Sense (cont)

• Find has to understand
• What does understand mean?
• How does a machine have a goal?
• Practical Decisions
• Can the tower support another block?
• Is there even another block available?
• Common Sense
• is an immense society of hard-earned
  practical ideas of multitudes of
  life-learned rules and exceptions
• These layers below eventually become so
  embedded that a human can rarely explain each
  step in an abstract idea.

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1.6 Agents and agencies

• Intelligence is a combination of simpler things
• Keep individual agents stupid
• Intelligent behavior comes from groups
• Agencies
• Agency controlling knows its job
• Agent controlled knows nothing
• Agencies micromanage
• Trying to control too much would lead to
  failure

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Borrowed from a www.weebls-stuff.com break
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Wholes and Parts

• It is the nature of the mind that makes
  individuals kin, and the differences in the
  shape, form, or manner of the material atoms out
  of whose intricate relationships that mind is
  built are altogether trivial.
• - Isaac Asimov

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2.1 Components and Connections

• Huge tasks are reduced for agents, so Builders
  role appears nonexistant
• Builders only works to complete the task when
  the other agents are properly linked. This is
  roughly a tree, but sub-agents can resemble a
  web.

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2.2 Novelists and Reductionists

• Reductionists Build on old ideas
• Usually correct approach in the sciences
• Novelists Champion new hypotheses
• Correct when older ideas have had more time to
  show flaws

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2.2 Novelists and Reductionists (cont)

• Psychology or laws of thought cannot be
  explained by all-inclusive physical laws based on
  the immaterial atoms of the brain
• Require additional theories and principles for
  higher levels of organization
• Explanations for Builder as an agency do not
  conflict with explanations of the lower-level
  agents.
• Each higher level of description must add to
  knowledge about lower levels

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2.3 Parts and Wholes

• Holistic or Gestalt
• - A symbolic configuration or pattern of
  elements so unified as a whole that its
  properties cannot be derived from a simple
  summation of its parts (Dictionary.com)
• - Usually used to explain subjective questions
• Other explanations will eventually be found
• - Topics of art, culture, style, etc are
  actually technical for agents
• - Much more difficult to study that objective
  interactions, but not impossible. More must be
  studied about our minds.

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2.4 Holes and Parts

• Life and Mind
• Cannot be used to describe the smallest
  components.
• Used to describe the ways in which the larger
  assemblies interact
• Life has lost its initial mystery mind retains
  it as so little is known of mental agents

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2.5 Easy Things are Hard

• Builder was made at MIT in the 1960s
• Had a mechanical hand, TV eye, and computer
• Designed to play with blocks
• Fragmented into hundreds of smaller little
  programs
• Showed how scientists were forced to look much
  more closely than in ordinary life
• Many unexpected complications

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2.5 Easy Things are Hard (cont)

• (Builder)
• Humans learn from experience to recognize
  possibly difficult situations
• Humans also develop policies for uncertainties
• To anticipate, imagine, plan, predict, and
  prevent involves millions of little processes,
  assumed to be common sense
• In general, were least aware of what our minds
  do best

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2.6 Are People Machines?

• The terms machine and computerlike has become
  synonymous to trivial
• The connotation of machine is misleading with
  regard to humans.
• We can no more be compared to modern machines
  than we could be to early organisms
• As their complexity increases with our knowledge
  of the brain and mind, the difference will seem
  smaller