Society of Mind

CHAPTER 1 PROLOGUE Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.Albert Einstein 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 callagents.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 ofthemwe 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 soMinsky, Marvin is the author of 'Society of Mind' with ISBN 9780671657130 and ISBN 0671657135.