The Emotion Machine

1

See http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/parker/lightverse.htm

2

Barry Took and Marty Feldman, Round the Horne, BBC Radio, 1966

3

This list is adapted from a note from Aaron Sloman in comp.ai.philosophy, 16/5/1995.

4

Nikolaas Tinbergen, The Study of Instinct, Oxford University Press, London, 1951. [See §§Tinbergen’s Theory.]

5

In The Strange Necessity, 1928. ISBN: 0781270626.

6

See Glossary: Cross-Exclusion.

7

However, I recommend Aaron Sloman’s discussion of this in http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/misc/talks/gatsby.slides.pdf.

8

In Girl, Interrupted, Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 137-143.

9

Such an ‘all-or-none’ view of what ‘understand’ means can be seen at http://home.hanmir.com/~prolog/ai/mind.html or in“Minds, Brains, and Computers” by John Searle, in Philosophy: The Quest for Truth. Oxford Univ. Press; 5th edition, ISBN: 0195156242

10

R. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, Modern Library, 1994, ISBN: 0679601279. Note that when scientists say that two are representations are ‘equivalent,’ they do not mean to suggest that both are equally practical.

11

Michael Lewis, “Self-conscious Emotions,” American Scientist vol. 83, Jan 1995.

12

http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/a/a8rh/

13

This could relate to some psychoanalytic theories, which argue that such objects might help to make transition from early attachments to other kinds of relationships. See, for example, www.mythosandlogos.com/Klein.htm.

14

See §Memes: Dawkins, Henson, Blackmore.

15

[John Bowlby, Attachment, Basic Books, N.Y. 1973, p. 217]

16

ibid. Bowlby bases this on some research of H.R. Schaffer and P. E. Emerson, ‘The development of social attachments in infancy,’ Monogr. Soc. Res. Child Dev., 29, 3, 1-77, 1964.

17

John Bowlby, Separation p26. Basic Books, N.Y. 1973 ISBN 465-07691-2

18

Harry Harlow, American Psychologist, 13, 573-685, 1958, http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Harlow/love.htm.

19

Jane van Lawick-Goodall, ‘The behavior of Free-living Chimpanzees in the Gombe Stream Reserve,’ Anim. Behav. Monogr. I: 161-311, 1968

20

In 1973, Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen shared a Nobel Prize for these and other discoveries.

21

There also is some evidence that imprinting resembles addiction. For example, Jaak Panksepp’s [1988] experiments suggest that separation-distress may be similar to pain, because it is relieved by opiods. Howard Hoffman [1994] speculates that an object can become an Imprimer when certain aspects of its motion or shape arouse an innate mechanism that releases endorphins in the imprintee’s brain, and he conjectures that the resulting feelings of pleasure or comfort then somehow cause the object to be classified as ‘familiar’ enough to overcome other fearful reactions. In §9-x-Pleasure I’ll suggest that such feelings may play a somewhat less direct role.

22

Y. Spencer-Booth and R. A. Hinde, Animal Behavior, 19, 174-191 and 595-605, 1971

23

S. Seay, 1964

24

[See Chapter 4 of Digging Dinosaurs, John R. Horner and James Gorman, Harper and Row, 1998, ISBN -06-097314-5.]

25

For example, see Charles A. Nelson’s article at http://www.biac.duke.edu/education/courses/spring03/cogdev/readings/C.A.%20Nelson%20(2001).pdf

26

Francesca Acerra, Yves Burnod and Scania de Schonen, http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/Proceedings/esann/esannpdf/es1999-22.pdf

27

Meltzoff and Moore (1977) appear to have shown that infants can imitate lip protrusion, mouth opening, tongue protrusion, and finger movement. See http://ilabs.washington.edu/meltzoff/pdf/97Meltzoff_Moore_FacialImit.pdf

28

“Studies in Animal and Human Behaviour,” Vol I, p. 132, Harvard Univ. Press, 1970

29

Multiple attachments are reported in Schaffer, H.R. and Emerson P.E. (1964) The development of social attachments in infancy, Monographs of Social Research in Child Development 29: no. 94. However, I could not find any studies of the long-term effects of having several Imprimers.

30

From a 1961 letter to Mrs. H. L. Austin

31

In Expression of The Emotions In Man And Animals

32

In §6-3 we’ll say more about what sometimes makes a goal feel like a force.

33

Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall, in “Pain Mechanisms: A New Theory”, Science, 150, p. 975, 1965.

34

For example, see www.umass.edu/preferen/mpapers/SingerEmpathy.pdf

35

in “Why you can’t build a machine that feels pain,” Brainstorms, Bradford Books, 1978. This is an ironic title for the deeper idea that ‘pain’ is a suitcase word that comprises so many ideas and processes that it does not make much technical sense to speak of it as definite kind of entity.

36

See “Pain: Past, Present and Future, “ Ronald Melzack, Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 1993, 47:4, 615-629.

37

Marian Osterweis, Arthur Kleinman, and David Mechanic, “Pain and disability: Clinical, Behavioral, and Public Policy Perspectives.” National Academy Press, 1987

38

F.M. Lewis, “Experienced personal control and quality of life in late stage cancer patients. Nursing Research, 31(2) 113-119, 1982

39

—From a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, written during Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading.

40

See http://www.counselingforloss.com/article8.htm.

41

“Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament,” pp 47-48, The Free Press, Macmillan, New York, 1993.

42

Kay Redfield Jamison, “Manic-Depressive Illness and Creativity,” Sci. Amer., Feb. 1995 V. 272 No. 2 Pp. 62-67

43

Most animals simply do not have the high-level resources that people have, and this makes it risky to apply to ourselves what we learn from laboratory animals.

44

“Duplication describes a remedy for this.”

45

Thus, to ascend from the top of Kilimanjaro to the summit of, say, Mt. Everest, you would have to climb down and then up again.

46

See my essay on Jokes, at web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt

47

See the extensive discussion in William James’ text, “The Varieties of Religious Experience.”

48

Sigmund Freud, in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 1920, p. 259.

49

For more details of this episode, see §4.5 of SoM.

50

www.srichinmoy.org/html/library/questions_answers/consciousness_qa.htm

51

Fodor, J. A., Can there be a science of mind? Times Literary Supplement. July 3, 1992, pp5-7.

52

Chapter 2 of Conversations with Neil’s Brain, REF

53

In comp.ai.philosophy, 14 Dec. 1994

54

An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748

55

In sci.psychology.consciousness, 15 Jun 96.

56

There are important exceptions to this. It would seem that experts like J.S. Bach developed ways to accomplish more multiple, yet still similar goals in parallel. However, as their skills improve, most such experts become less and less able to tell the rest of us how they do them.

57

William James discussed this extensively. See: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/jimmy11.htm. Several other more modern ideas about this are developed in Daniel Dennett’s 1991 book, Consciousness Explained.

58

So, despite a popular intuition, research on parallel processing has shown that such systems are frequently prone to end up accomplishing less for the same amount of computational power Nevertheless, if that cost can be borne, then the final result may come sooner!

59

See Parallel Distributed Processing, Rumelhart, D., J. McClelland et al., MIT Press, Cambridge, MA: 1986. See also my discussion of ‘opacity’ in http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/SymbolicVs.Connectionist.html. For some limitations of the most popular forms of neural networks, see [Perceptrons.][Ref.]

60

See Jeffrey Siskind, publication about…

61

Chapter §8 will propose more details about how our memory structures are organized to so swiftly deliver such information. Basically, when a problem arises, some processes may start to solve it before other processes formulate questions about it.

62

See §25.4 of The Society of Mind, p257.

63

” —psyche-b@listserv.uh.edu, 29 Sep 1997.

64

In Outlines of Psychology, 1897.

65

This idea is explained in more detail at http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/MatterMindModels.html.

66

In a discussion on the newsgroup comp.ai.philosophy, 7 Feb 1992.

67

Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained. [ref.]

68

[Ref to Metaphor, Lakoff, etc.]

69

I don’t think modern programming, on the whole, has reached this stage. Indeed, I did once suggest, very long ago, that a Cartesian Theater concept be a good model of programming. Old design paper]

70

http://www.imprint.co.uk/online/new1.html

71

Dennett, Daniel C and Kinsbourne, Marcel, (1992) Time and the Observer. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2): pp183-247. http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000264/

72

SoM 25.04 Continuity.

73

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html.

74

Ref. to Penrose’s book.

75

This example is from Frederik Pohl’s prescient short story Day Million in his anthology, Day Million, Ballantine Books 1970 ISBN: 0330236067

76

More details about construction planning were developed by Scott Fahlman in his 1973 paper at ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR-283.pdf

77

In Principles of Psychology, p359

78

According to Tinbergen, when an animal can’t make a decision, this often results in dropping both alternatives and doing something that seem to be quite irrelevant. However, these “displacement activities” seem to be fixed, so they do not suggest that those animals have thoughtful ways to deal with such conflicts.

79

In The Natural History Of Religion, 1757. http://www.soci.niu.edu/~phildept/Dye/NaturalHistory.html

80

Some early steps in that project are described in ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-200.pdf.

81

See http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/PR1971.html

82

In fact, that darker horizontal streak is not the lower edge, but is part of the surface next to that edge, slightly shadowed because that edge is worn-down.

83

V.S. Ramachandran, Science, v305 no.5685, 6 August 2004.

84

in www.richardgregory.org/papers/brainy_mind/brainy-mind.htm. See also, www.physiol.m.u-tokyo.ac.jp/resear/resear.html

85

This program was based on ideas of Yoshiaki Shirai (and Manuel Blum). See ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-263.pdf. However, I should add that Builder had almost no competence for any but neat geometrical scenes—and, so far as I know, there still are no ‘general-purpose vision machines” that can, for example, look around a room and recognize everyday objects therein. I suspect that this is mainly because they lack enough knowledge about real-world objects; we’ll discuss this more in Chapter 6.

86

See papers by Adolfo Guzman and David Waltz at ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-139.pdf and

ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR-271.pdf

87

See Zenon Pylyshyn, http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/faculty/ZPbbs98.html. [Broken Link] The octagon example is from Kanizsa, G. (1985). Seeing and Thinking. Acta Psychologica, 59, 23-33.

88

In this kind of diagram, each object is represented by a network that describes relationships between its parts. Then each part, in turn, is further described in terms of relationships between its parts, etc.,—until those sub-descriptions descend to a level at which each one because a simple list of properties, such as an object’s color, size, and shape. For more details, see §§Frames, Quillian’s thesis in Semantic Information Processing, and Patrick Winston’s book, The Psychology of Computer Vision.

89

Some persons claim to imagine scenes as though looking at a photograph, whereas other persons report no such vivid experiences. However, some studies appear to show that both are equally good at recalling details of remembered scenes.

90

See, for example, http://www.usd.edu/psyc301/Rensink.htm and http://nivea.psycho.univ-paris5.fr/Mudsplash/Nature_Supp_Inf/Movies/Movie_List.html.

91

This prediction scheme appears in section §6-7 of my 1953 PhD thesis, “Neural-Analog Networks and the Brain-Model Problem, Mathematics Dept., Princeton University, Dec. 1953. At that time, I had heard that there were ‘suppressor bands’ like the one in my diagram, at the margins of some cortical areas. These seem to have vanished from more recent texts; perhaps some brain researchers could find them again.

92

In Push Singh’s PhD thesis, [ref] two robots actually consider such questions. Also refer to 2004 BT paper.

93

The idea of a panalogy first appeared in Bib: Frames, and more details about this were proposed in chapter 25 of SoM. A seeming alternative might be to have almost-separate sub-brains for each realm—but that would lead to similar questions at some higher cognitive level.

94

I got some of these ideas about ‘trans’ from the early theories of Roger C. Schank, described in Conceptual information processing, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1975.

95

Tempest-Tost, 1992, ISBN: 0140167927.

96

As suggested in §3-12 we often learn more from failure than from success—because success means you already possessed that skill, whereas failure instructs us to learn something new.

97

See Douglas Lenat, The Dimensions of Context Space, at http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/phw/6xxx/lenat2.pdf

98

This discussion is adapted from my introduction to Semantic Information Processing, MIT Press, 1969.

99

From: Alexander R.Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist: Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968.

100

Landauer, Thomas K. (1986). “How much do people remember? Some estimates of the quantity of learned information in long-term memory.” Cognitive Science, 10, 477-493. See also Ralph Merkle’s description of this in http://www.merkle.com/humanMemory.html. Furthermore, according to Ronald Rosenfeld, the information in typical text is close to about 6 bits per word. See Rosenfeld, Ronald, “A maximum entropy approach to adaptive statistical language modeling,” Computer, Speech and Language, 10, 1996, also at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/roni/WWW/me-csl-revised.ps. In these studies, the term ‘bit’ of information is meant in the technical sense of C.E. Shannon in http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/paper.html.

101

My impression that this also applies to the results reported by R.N. Haber in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2, 583-629,1979.

102

A. M. Turing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, at www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~dylan/Turing.html

103

See several essays about self-organizing learning systems at: Gary Drescher, Made-Up Minds, MIT Press 1991, ISBN: 0262041200; Lenat’s 1983 “AM” system at http://web.media.mit.edu/~haase/thesis/node52.html; Kenneth Haase’s thesis at http://web.media.mit.edu/~haase/thesis/; Pivar, M. and Finkelstein, M. (1964) in The Programming Language LISP, MIT Press 1966; Solomonoff, R. J. “A formal theory of inductive inference,” Information and Control, 7 (1964), pp.1-22; Solomonoff, R. J. “An Inductive Inference Machine,” IRE Convention Record, Section on Information Theory, Part 2, pp. 56-62, 1957. Also, see his essay at http://world.std.com/~rjs/barc97.html. In recent years this has led to a field of research with the name of ‘Genetic Programming.’

104

Technically, if a system has already been optimized, then any change is likely to make it worse until one find a higher peak, some distance away in the “fitness space.”

105

See §2.6 of Frames, §27.1 of SoM, and Charniak, E. C., Toward a Model of Children’s Story Comprehension. ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AITR-266.pdf

106

There has been some recent progress toward extracting such kinds of knowledge from large number of users of the Web. See Push Singh’s ‘OpenMind Commonsense’ project at http://commonsense.media.mit.edu/.

107

John McCarthy, “Programs with Common Sense,” in Proc. Symposium on Mechanization of Thought Processes, 1959. Reprinted in Semantic Information Processing, p404.

108

People sometimes use ‘abstract’ to mean ‘complex’ or ‘highly intellectual’—but here I mean almost the opposite: a more abstract description ignores more details—which makes it more useful because it depends less on the features of particular instances.

109

See Elizabeth Johnston’s notes on “Infantile Amnesia” at http://pages.slc.edu/~ebj/IM_97/Lecture6/L6.html

110

In each cycle of operation, the program finds some differences between the current state and the desired one. Then it uses a separate method to guess which of those differences is most significant, and makes a new subgoal to reduce that difference. If this results in a smaller difference, the process goes on; otherwise it works on some other difference. For more details of how this worked, see Newell, A., J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon, “Report on a general problem solving program,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Processing. UNESCO, Paris, pp. 256-64. A more accessible description is in Newell, A., and Simon, H. A., “GPS, a program that simulates human thought,” Computers and Thought, E. A. Feigenbaum and J. Feldman (Eds.), McGraw-Hill, New York, 1963.

111

See Allen Newell and Herbert Simon (1972), Human Problem Solving, Prentice Hall; (June 1972), ASIN: 0134454030. Also, see a problem-solving architecture called “SOAR.”. [Ref.]

112

See A. Newell. J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon, “A variety of intelligent learning in a general problem solver,” in Self-Organizing Systems, M. T. Yovitts and S. Cameron, Eds., Pergamon Press, New York, 1960.

113

In Nicomachean Ethics (Book III. 3, 1112b). This appears to be a description of what today we call ‘top-down search.”

114

This was written before ‘security’ began to be imposed on trains.

115

See Peter Kaiser’s www.yorku.ca/eye/disapear.htm. [Also, see §§Change-Blindness] However, there are some signals that do not ‘fade away.’ Because we also have some additional sensors that evolved to keep responding to certain particular harmful conditions. [See §§Alarms.]

116

Roger Schank has conjectured that this may be one of our principal ways to learn and remember—in “Tell Me a Story ” Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1990.

117

There are more details about this in my essay at /web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/MusicMindMeaning.html

118

In Sentics, New York: Doubleday, 1978, the pianist-physiologist Manfred Clynes describes certain temporal patterns, each of which might serve as a ‘command’ to induce a certain emotional state.

119

G. Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form, Crown Pub. 1972, ISBN: 0517527766

120

One could ask the same questions about gossip, sports, and games. See How people spend their time, http://www2.stats.govt.nz/domino/external/pasfull/pasfull.nsf/0/4c2567ef00247c6acc256ef6000bbb61/%24FILE/around-the-clock.pdf

121

In his 1970 PhD thesis, Patrick H. Winston called this a “similarity network.” See [AIM xxx].

122

http://www.gutenberg.net/etext94/arabn11.txt

123

Letter to Joseph Priestly, 19 Sept. 1772.

124

See http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Articles/Pages/how-to-decide.html

125

Section 30.6 of SoM discusses why the idea of free will seems so powerful. There are many more ideas about this in Daniel Dennett’s 1984 book, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, ISBN 0262540428.

126

Section 30.6 of SoM discusses why the idea of free will seems so powerful. There are many more ideas about this in Daniel Dennett’s 1984 book, Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting, ISBN 0262540428.

127

See the book, Computers and Thought for some of the accomplishments of that period.

128

Evans, Thomas G. (1963) A Heuristic Program to Solve Geometric-Analogy Problems, abridged version in Minsky (ed) Semantic Information Processing, MIT Press 1968, pp. 271-353.

129

Aristotle, On the Soul, Book I, Part 1.

130

Richard P. Feynman, The Character of Physical Law, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1965. ISBN 0262560038, p168.

131

Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error, Avon Books, Nov 1995, ISBN: 0380726475

132

[A system would also face similar problem if several Selectors were turned on at once? Refer to §Currencies.]

133

At the lowest levels, the Critics and Selectors become the same as the Ifs and Thens of simple reactions. At the reflective and higher levels, the Critics will tend to engage so many resources that they can’t be distinguished from Ways to Think. In his essay, “Reflective Critics,” Push Singh discusses Critics with such abilities. See http://web.media.mit.edu/~push/ReflectiveCritics.pdf

134

Logic can be useful after a problem is solved, for making credit assignments [§8.5] and for solving simplified versions of problems. See §§Logic.

135

There is an excellent survey of attempts to classify Problem-Types on Manuela Viezzer’s webpage at www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~mxv/publications/onto_engineering. One such attempt was made in a rule-based theory of thinking called SOAR. There, obstacles were called ‘impasses’ and were classified into just four types: (1) no rules apply to the situation, (2) several rules match, but there is no higher-level rules to choose among them, (3) there are several such rules but they conflict, and, (4) all such rules have met with failure. For more about Soar, See http://tip.psychology.org/newell.html

136

Reference to Push Singh’s paper on “Reflective Critics.”

137

Principles of Psychology. Chap. 25 p452

138

See Ortony, A., Clore, G.L., Collins, A., The Cognitive Structure of the Emotions, New York, Cambridge University Press (1988).

139

These quotations are from Poincare 1908. The Foundations of Science, 1982, ISBN: 0819123188.

140

In comp.ai.philosophy, Nov 20 1995.

141

Some theorists question the existence of —this sort of unconscious processing. Paul Plsek discusses this issue at length: “Some experts dismiss the notion that creativity can be described as a sequence of steps in a model. For example, Vinacke (1953) is adamant that creative thinking in the arts does not follow a model [and] Gestalt philosophers like Wertheimer assert that the process of creative thinking … does not lend itself to the segmentation implied by the steps of a model. But while such views are strongly held, they are in the minority. … In contrast to the prominent role that some models give to subconscious processes, Perkins (1981) argues that subconscious mental processes are behind all thinking and, therefore, play no extraordinary role in creative thinking.”—Paul E. Plsek in www.directedcreativity.com/pages/WPModels.html Ask him at paulplsek@directedcreativity.com: See also Perkins, DN (1981) The Mind’s Best Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Vinacke, WE (1953) The Psychology of Thinking. New York: McGraw Hill; and Wertheimer, M (1945) Productive Thinking. New York: Harper.

142

http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1973/tinbergen-lecture.html

143

http://nobelprize.org/medicine/laureates/1973/lorenz-lecture.html

144

This could be related to why some brain waves become irregular when our thinking encounters obstacles.

145

This figure includes the names of some current ideas about how such records are represented. One can see descriptions of some of these schemes by searching the Web with keywords like working memory, short-term memory, and global workspace. The ideas of Bernard Baars (see http://www.imprint.co.uk/online/baars.html) seem especially relevant to me.

146

The construction of long-term memories appears to involve special kinds of sleep, in ways that are not yet understood. It also appears that different kinds of memories (e.g., about autobiographical events, about other kinds of episodes, about what are called ‘declarative’ facts, and about perceptual and motor events) are each stored in somewhat different ways and in different locations in the brain.

147

Section 19.10 of The Society of Mind described a scheme called “Closing the Ring” that could help to re-connect some of the parts that were not at first retrieved.

148

This is a version of a scene described in chapter §1.0 of “The Society of Mind.”

149

“Et le second est que, bien qu’elles fissent plusieurs choses aussi bien, ou peut-être mieux qu’aucun de nous, elles manqueraient infailliblement en quelques autres, par lesquelles on découvrirait qu’elles n’agiraient pas par connaissance, mais seulement par la disposition de leurs organes. Car, au lieu que la raison est un instrument universel, qui peut servir en toutes sortes de rencontres, ces organes ont besoin de quelque particulière disposition pour chaque action particulière; d’où vient qu’il est moralement impossible qu’il y en ait assez de divers en une machine pour la faire agir en toutes les occurrences de la vie, de même façon que notre raison nous fait agir.” Rene Descartes, in Discours de la méthode (1637)

150

Chapter III of The Descent of Man

151

Turing described these “universal” machines before any modern computers were built. For more details about how these work, see http://mathworld.wolfram.com/UniversalTuringMachine.html.

152

This switching usually happens so quickly that we don’t notice it; this is a typical instance of the Immanence Illusion [See §4-3.1.]

153

There is a detailed theory of how this works in §24.6 Direction-Nemes of The Society of Mind.

154

It was recently discovered only recently that people often do not perceive some very large changes in a scene. See [give reference] for astonishing demonstrations of this.

155

From http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.html

156

See Chapter 3 of William Calvin, How Brains Think, Basic Books, 1966.

157

For more details about the relations among different nearby things, see chapter 24 of SoM, which also tries to explain why the shapes of things don’t seem to change when we look at them from different directions—as well as why things don’t seem to change their locations when you move your eyes.

158

I wonder if Hume had some such idea when he said: “All belief of matter of fact or real existence is derived merely from some object, present to the memory or senses, and a customary conjunction between that and some other object. … [This results from] a species of natural instincts, which no reasoning or process of the thought and understanding is able either to produce or to prevent.”—David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1748.

159

David Hume, ibid. Part II.

160

Hume was especially concerned with this question of how evidence can lead to conclusions: “It is only after a long course of uniform experiments in any kind, that we attain a firm reliance and security with regard to a particular event. Now where is that process of reasoning which, from one instance, draws a conclusion, so different from that which it infers from a hundred instances that are nowise different from that single one? I cannot find, I cannot imagine any such reasoning.”

161

Note that this is a difference-engine ‘in reverse,’ because it changes the internal description, instead of changing the actual situation. See “Verbal expression” in SoM §22.10).

162

Robert Stickgold et al., Cognitive Neuroscience (Vol. 12, No. 2) in March 2000, also Nature Neuroscience (Vol. 3, No. 12) in December 2000.

163

Another answer might be that some information is stored ‘dynamically’—for example by being repeatedly echoed between two or more different clusters of brain cells.

164

I described a similar system for verbal communication in §22.10 of SoM.

165

The K-line idea was first developed in [Ref: Plain Talk] and [Ref: K-lines]. Chapter 8 of SoM describes more ideas about what might happen when K-lines conflict.

166

Perhaps she used that facial expression to help her maintain her concentration. If this became part of her subsequent skill, it could later be hard to eliminate.

167

In the field of Artificial Intelligence, the importance of credit-assignment was first recognized in Arthur Samuel’s research on machine learning. [Ref.]

168

A. Newell, “The chess machine,” in Proc. Western Joint Computer Conf. March 1955.

169

People often describe such moments as the times at which they make their decisions—and then regard these as ‘acts of free will.” However, one might instead regard those moments as merely the times at which one’s ‘deciding’ comes to a stop.

170

Presumably, these capacities also may vary among different parts of the same mind.

171

Some of this section is adapted from §7.10 of SoM.

172

Harold G. McCurdy, The Childhood Pattern of Genius. Horizon Magazine, May 1960, pp. 32-38. McCurdy concluded that mass education in public schools has “the effect of reducing all three of the above factors to minimum values.”

173

Where do we get those default assumptions? Answer: we usually make a new frame by making changes in some older one, and values that were not changed at that time will be inherited from those older ones.

174

I should add that a frame can include some additional slots that activate other processes or sets of resources. This way, a frame could transiently activate ways to think—so that one almost instantly knows how to deal with some familiar object or situation.

175

I should add that numerical representations have many useful applications. However, even when those numbers have some practical use, one can only alter them by increasing or decreasing them, but cannot add other nuances. It is much the same ‘logical’ systems; each ‘proposition’ must be true or false, so the system still uses something like numbers, except that their values can only be 0 or 1. Also, see see SOM, section 5.3.

176

§§20.1 of SoM argues that even our thoughts can be ambiguous.

177

Also, several such functions could be superimposed in the very same spatial regions, by using by genetically distinct lines of cells that interact mainly among themselves.

178

Later Kant claims that our minds must start with some rules like “Every change must have a cause.” Today, one might interpret this as suggesting that we’re born with frames that are equipped with slots that we tend to link to the causes of changes. In the simplest case, of course, that need could be satisfied by a link to whatever preceded the change that occurred; in later years we could learn to refine those links.

179

There is more discussion of this in web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/SymbolicVs.Connectionist.html.

180

Daniel Dennett, in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. A similar premise was prevalent before the dawn of modern genetics: that every sperm already contained a perfectly formed little personage. However, in Brainstorms, 1978, Daniel Dennett goes on to point out that, “Homunculi are bogeymen only if they duplicate entire the talents they are rung in to explain. If one can get a team or committee of relatively ignorant, narrow-minded, blind homunculi to produce the intelligent behavior of the whole, this is progress.”

181

Here we use “Model of X” as in §4-3 to mean any structure or process that one can use to answer some questions about X.

182

We’ll review some traditional ‘unified theories of psychology in §§Models Of Mind.

183

“The Trouble With Psychological Darwinism” at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html

184

See http://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/witforwisdom.html

185

Greg Egan Diaspora, Millennium, 1998, ISBN 0-75280-925-3

186

Daniel Dennett in 1988, Times Literary Supplement, 16-22 ix.

187

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, (1933).

188

Ref: Adapted from an essay by Bertram Forer in http://skepdic.com/coldread.html

189

See Shawn Carlson’s double-blind study of this in Nature, Dec. 5, 1985.

190

Thus Einstein’s E=Mc² was only a small variation of Newton’s E=Mv², but led to major changes in the ways that we then could understand the world.

191

There is a longer list in SoM §Self-Control.

192

See http://www.nobel.se/medicine/laureates/1981/sperry-lecture.html

193

Paraphrased from §11.8 of SoM.

194

Nevertheless, many feelings seem to come with varied degrees of both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ intensities, and this has led many psychologists to maintain that this dimension of intensity is what distinguishes emotions from other types of mental states. See SoM, 28.2 and 28.3, and Ortony, A., Clore, G.L., Collins, A., The Cognitive Structure of the Emotions, New York, Cambridge University Press (1988) ISBN 0521386640

195

In §13.1 of SoM, we discussed how we frequently make similar such distinctions among our various sorts of goals and subgoals.

196

See http://www.intriguing.com/mp/lifeofbrian/

197

The American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916), in The Philosophy of Loyalty, 1908, Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8265-1267-4

198

“The Trouble With Psychological Darwinism” at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html

199

Roger Schank has suggested that we mainly remember things that ‘make sense’ because our memory systems have ways to store representations that have the form of coherent stories. See Roger Schank, “Tell me a Story,”Northwestern University Press, 1995, ISBN 0-8101-1313-9

200

Encarta World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation.

201

Generally, if a certain reaction leads to a reward, then that response will become more likely later. Psychologists attribute this” Law of Effect’ to the American psychologist Edward Thorndike (1874-1949).

202

Piaget, Jean. (1923). The Language and Thought of the Child, Rutledge (2001) ISBN 0415267501

203

Many readers interpreted my earlier book, The Society of Mind, as proposing this kind of community view. However, that was not my intention, and this section may help to correct that impression.

204

Another difference between human employees and parts of a brain is that each member of a company has personal conflicts of interest. For example, each employee is hired to increase the company’s profit, but this goes against each employee’s ambition to earn more salary—because each paycheck reduces the firm’s total earnings. It’s the same when an army orders its fighters to try to kill those on the opposite side; each soldier still wishes to stay alive.

205

In a publicly held corporation, the officers are not autonomous (at least in principle, if not in actual fact) but actually are employees appointed by directors who are elected by stockholders.

206

Richard Dawkins, The Meme Machine, Oxford University Press March 1999, ISBN 019-850365-2. Also see Susan Blakemore, The Meme-machine... Oxford University Press, 2001, ISBN ISBN 0-19-850365-2

207

In A Light Exists in Spring, at http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=6707

208

See http://eksl-www.cs.umass.edu/~atkin/791T/chalmers.html and http://consc.net/papers/puzzle.html. For more details, see Journal of Consciousness Studies 2(3): 200-19, 1995 or http://consc.net/papers/facing.html.

209

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind, The University of Chicago Press, 1949

210

In fact, a single spot of red may not be sensed as being red; in general the colors we see depend, to a large extent, on which other colors are in its neighborhood. Also, some readers might be surpised to hear that the visual system in a human brain includes dozens of different processing centers.

211

Those touches seem different in ones low-level descriptions, because each relates to a different ‘hand’. But those touches seem more similar at levels that can refer to ‘your hand’.

212

This discussion of verbal metaphor is paraphrased from §29.8 of SoM.