The Society of Mind
by Marvin Minsky
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marvin MinskyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1988-03-15
ISBN: 0671657135
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Book Reviews of The Society of Mind
Book Review: The emotional brain
Summary: 5 Stars
1. Study what seems least
2. Agents are the components of a system that give the system agency
3. Machines behave in a lifeless manner
4. People are not machines
5. The longer a conflict occurs with sub agents the weaker the agent is among competitor agents
6. Agents compete actively while interest is strong (If - Do, Condition - Response)
7. Agencies live in hierarchies and levels of administration reduce complexity and threshold pole the agents yielding a group positive or negative response.
8. High level agents control lower level agents
9. Pain reduces interest in long-term goals. Pain puts a focus on immediate problems (hunger and danger)
10. Pain repels and pleasure attracts
11. Limited exploitation creates agency: for example oscillation between work and sleep, limiting work in combination with anger, balancing hunger and pain with a focus on the problem of eating
12. Many questions are unanswerable
13. Unanswerable questions often create circular causality logic
14. Consciousness is doing and doing does not necessarily require understanding how the process works.
15. Cooperation requires complex interactions between agents. Competition is less complex and less productivity.
16. Learning Meaning has four types: Uniframe (several description combined into one), Accumulation (collections of samples, descriptions by experience, slow to make discovery by pattern match), Reformulation, and transformation.
17. Learning a new idea is possible as the individual accessing structures in the mind. Old structures provide a beginning reference and either are built upon or eventually bypassed in place of the new idea.
18. What we think is based on our spatial learning during youth about the world of space.
19. Accumulation: accumulation rarely feels satisfactory because we expect unity and disunity occurs in categorization, for example, birds fly, penguins are birds, penguins don't fly. Rules are not perfect. Rules reflect that which is typical and describe the exceptions.
20. Reformulation: reformulation is finding new descriptions that make the problem easier. When we can't solve a problem, we reformulate and seek escape by finding a new way to solve the problem.
21. Reformulation builds on what is already known
22. Reformulation connects things with goals in many different ways:
function-structure (Tables are for supporting things), end-means (If I want to reach higher, I can stand on a table), conclusion-premise (If you put something on a table, its height increases), effect-cause (I can reach higher because I start higher), and body-support (Tables hold things away from the floor).
23. The world of sensation: sensation -> reception -> recognition -> cognition
24. Each new idea must compete against a collection of skills associated with older ideas.
25. Memory: Conscience is concerned not with the present but with the past
26. Memory: Recall is not complete detail paradigm; instead, recall is done as memory fragments.
27. Memory: Whenever you answer a question without delay, it seem the answer was already in your mind.
28. Emotion opposites: fear-affection, attachment-dependancy, and hate-love.
29. Behavior can be modeled as sensors and effectors (sensor detect pattern and effectors can a systematic response)
30. Cross exclusion: An activity can suppress the activity of its competitor agent. Avalanche occurs when all agents equal compete for a resource. Agents must have a way to access resources cooperatively.
31. Each simple principle or mechanism must b controlled to operate within some limited range.
32. Memory: Create banks of memory and Associate problem agents with a separate memory banks and restrict each specialist agent to learn only while the goal is active. The agents could be interconnect and cooperative, however this is unlikely; and mostly likely they will be exploitive and competitive in acheiving their goals.
33. One gains from learning better ways to learn
34. When we violate standards we feel shame
35. In logic arguments are true or false. In real life arguments are strong or weak; we seek parallelism in our arguments as a reduncancy against failure; parallel reasoning is harder to break because there are more exists more than one way to answer a problem. We rarely need to know right or wrong and often prefer confrontation methods to fight out the best alternative.
36. The closest we can agree on meaning is in the expressions of mathematics.
37. Words: Language builds things in our minds. Words cannot be the substance of our thoughts. Instead, words control agents in our minds. It is the underlying emptiness of words that gives it potential versality. Language parts are divided into three categories: semantic, syntax, and grammer.
38. Words: Polynemes are k-line association domains for a word. A polyneme signals different agencies (color, shape, or texture agencies) too turn on process in their agences. Each agency must have a dictionary of words and memory to know how to respond to the polynemes, a bank composed of k-lines.
39. Context: Evidence is weighted threshold trigger of positive and negative values.
40. Context: Nemeic spiral: demand, inquire, vision, beliefs, social, language, shapes, touch, get, grasp, request, explain, touch, hearing, traits, physical, places, hearing, vision, move, and put.
41. Things: Whatever we may see or touch (nouns)
42. Differences: A discernible change by comparing two different things (verbs)
43. Cause: The cause of an action
44. Clause: A single phrase treated like a single word.
45. A gene expression is either off or on. Gene manufacture proteins and proteins produce specific chemicals. The cell contains many different types of proteins. Certain proteins move into the cell and serve messengers: 1. by altering other processes; change states of a specific gene 2. Certain protein combinations can turn genes on or off 3. Genes seem like small societies of agents. Certain cells emit specific chemicals and mobile cells follow the chemical scent.
46. How can genes build concepts in the mind? Genes only produce chemicals and how can a chemical create a concept. Genes determine the architecture of agencies destined to learn particular kinds of processes.
Summary of The Society of Mind
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.
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.
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