[HN Gopher] The Society of Mind (2011)
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The Society of Mind (2011)
Author : gjvc
Score : 123 points
Date : 2022-03-07 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ocw.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (ocw.mit.edu)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| From Stewart Brand's The MIT Media Lab: Inventing the Future:
|
| After a dinner of take-out dim sum, Minsky, who had been reading
| the Koran with some dismay at its violent inquiry-blunting
| formulae, sermonized, "Religion is a teaching machine-- a little
| deadly loop for putting itself in your mind and keeping it there.
| The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress
| doubt. It's interested in solving deep problems, not in
| understanding them. And it's correct in a sense, because the
| problems it deals with don't have solutions, because they're
| loops. 'Who made the world?' 'God.' You're not allowed to ask,
| 'Who made God?'"
|
| "Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the
| time." Minsky had heard that one before: "Everything is similar
| if you're willing to look that far out of focus. I'd watch that.
| Then you'll find that black is white. Look for differences!
| You're looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot."
| That lively loop has been cycling in my mind ever since!
| pmoriarty wrote:
| There are dogmatic forms of religion and non-dogmatic forms.
|
| The mystics of various religious affiliation sought a direct
| _experience_ of the transcendent reality, which as an
| experience itself is beyond dogma (though dogma could play a
| role in the experience 's interpretation).
| alexashka wrote:
| If you remove the dogma - what do you have left of religion,
| exactly?
|
| The two are inseparable.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" If you remove the dogma - what do you have left of
| religion, exactly?"_
|
| If you'd ever had a mystical experience, you wouldn't need
| to ask that question.
|
| Many have argued that mystical experiences were at the core
| of every major religion, and it was when people stopped
| having these experiences that dogma accreted.
| sweuder wrote:
| What is a mystical experience then?
|
| I would suppose that it went something like:
|
| 1. Person sees/experiences something
| interesting/abnormal/rare
|
| 2. Can't figure out how to explain what happened
|
| 3. Attributes experience to god/religion
|
| Once we started filling in that middle bit there was less
| around that could only be attributed to religion so it
| lost a lot of its draw.
|
| Now that we are closer to a state where we can attribute
| _most_ things to nature /science/etc religion does seem
| to be left with mostly dogma.
| alexashka wrote:
| > If you'd ever had a mystical experience, you wouldn't
| need to ask that question.
|
| Please speak for yourself.
|
| > Many have argued...
|
| Many have argued that slaves are totally fine and that we
| ought to continue having them. Or that burning witches
| works.
|
| So what? That's not an argument for or against anything -
| it is at best entertaining trivia to bring up at cocktail
| hour.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| Oh I've seen a lot of loops and asked a lot of questions
| about them.
|
| In one particular instance I had logically concluded myself
| into an extratemporal nihilism, where I forgot that time
| exists, therefore everything was meaningless. It ended when
| my friends reminded me that time indeed exists and everything
| will pass, including this momentary infinity.
|
| Your mind is, literally at the biological level, a bunch of
| loops for electricity to flow through. It's not like your
| mind channels energy to get rid of it? It's more efficient to
| hold onto energy, and you _need_ a loop for that to maintain
| continuous function.
|
| Don't mistake the spiral for a loop. It only _appears_ to go
| around in circles because you 're a lesser-dimensional being
| looking at it from a flat plane. Stars don't have stable
| orbits, they follow a straight line through warped spacetime.
| We also travel forwards in time. Everywhere is a point of no
| return because no place is exactly the same when returned to.
| Time is change. Evolution is an inevitable phenomena of some
| law of physics we might as well call God.
|
| Nature, like God, is mysterious. The more we learn, the less
| we know we know. Knowing anything, even a load of nothing,
| calms the mind. Asking questions is the surest way to engage
| a brain. Asking difficult questions is like discovering
| labyrinths. Yes, they're confusing to navigate. Yes, there be
| monsters. But also, loot and enlightenment.
|
| It turns out there's a bit of truth in everything and a byte
| of lies to chew through to get to the good stuff. Nature
| protects its bounty. You have teeth for a reason. Brush them
| and smile. You're God. love expands life
| life expands consciousness consciousness is vital to
| space travel travel, without moving.
| Helloyello wrote:
| [deleted]
| throwawayse wrote:
| disambiguation wrote:
| Replace "who made God" with "who made 1 = 1"
|
| Somethings are asserted (rather than argued) as axioms, because
| they give rise to useful interpretations of reality.
| Banana699 wrote:
| >who made 1 = 1
|
| The nervous system of every single animal in existence,
| unlike the existence of god.
|
| >because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality
|
| The problem is consensus and alternatives. If you reject the
| traditional answer of "1+1" and go for one of its many, many
| very convincing alternatives, would anybody go after you with
| a fork and threateningly insist you follow the
| $one_true_interpretation?
|
| That's what (organized Abrahamic) religions are usually
| criticized for, "useful" is entirely irrelevant and dependent
| on the objective function used, the real test of an ideology
| is : what if somebody chooses a different objective function?
| because (organized Abrahamic) religions are often
| totalitarian, they cope very badly with some nodes refusing
| the general consensus.
| disambiguation wrote:
| I would discourage turning this conversation into a pissing
| contest of which ideology is responsible for more harm.
| (re: darwinism at the start of the 20th century)
|
| I would much rather explore how the two can coexist. Does a
| material and immaterial explanation of reality make sense?
| alexashka wrote:
| > Somethings are asserted (rather than argued) as axioms,
| because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality.
|
| By who, and to what end?
|
| Most people don't even know what an axiom is. Axioms are for
| playing logic games in math land - there is no reason why we
| should adopt a similar approach to everyday life.
|
| Let me explain something about useful interpretations - we
| call those science. Science is when you go on to see what
| _is_ , repeatedly, verifiably so.
|
| I challenge you to find a _more_ useful interpretation of
| reality, than one that we can replicate trillions of times,
| reliably, to achieve wonders no human thought possible a
| hundred years ago.
| disambiguation wrote:
| Relax! I'm pro-science, bro.
|
| I'm not pushing an agenda, simply pointing out Minsky's
| hypocrisy. He thinks he's transcending the "loop" of
| ideology, but really just displacing one with another.
|
| But thanks anyway for the patronizing explanation that
| absolutely no one asked for.
| alexashka wrote:
| The scientific method and accepting axioms because they
| are 'useful' or for any other wishy-washy reason are
| incompatible.
|
| Sorry.
| fractallyte wrote:
| An even better deconstruction of religion was laid out in the
| Metamagical Themas column, in the January 1983 issue of
| Scientific American: "Virus-like sentences and self-replicating
| structures"
| (https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/).
|
| The article was about memes. And it presented religion as a
| meme: a viral idea that propagates partly through terrorizing
| the host mind ("If you don't believe, if you don't spread this
| meme, you'll burn in HELL!" - although it was more nuanced than
| my one-sentence summary...)
| colordrops wrote:
| How far Scientific American has fallen, catching its own
| culture war virus.
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| While science is a method and not a dogma, a lot of dogma gets
| called science and treated with exactly the kind of religious
| fervour science is supposed to be able to cut through. The
| number of people who could not run an experiment or parse a
| research paper exhorting everyone to 'trust The Science' over
| the last two years truly irritated me, less so for the
| religious beliefs they were pushing than how enthusiastically
| they were diluting the meaning of science as a method.
| sva_ wrote:
| > The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to
| suppress doubt.
|
| I've recently been thinking that the main reason why certain
| religions/ideologies are so popular, is in fact, because they
| release you from the burden of coming up with an answer to some
| very fundamental questions about life. There is this idea about
| the brain, that it tries to optimize energy-usage, and if you
| don't have to ask yourself these fundamental questions all the
| time, you can spend brainpower on other things. So people
| naturally follow a regime of dogmas proposed by some authority,
| to focus on other things in life.
|
| Or as an evolutionary argument: Those who had the luxury of
| ignoring contemplating their own existence, had the privilege
| of spending their brainpower on things that helped their
| community and subsequently helped it spread.
|
| About the topic at hand: I think this modular approach to the
| mind is misguided. By now I'm almost certain that the brain is
| compositional, instead. These phenomena described by Minsky
| surely are emergent, or at least most of them.
| breck wrote:
| I've been coming around to this as well, which surprised me
| as I thought I had left religion for good.
|
| > release you from the burden of coming up with an answer to
| some very fundamental questions about life.
|
| I'd even modify this to say "impossible burden". Science
| reduces to the model: P(A|B). No model is ever safe, since we
| can never observe the generator of B, and changes in B can
| turn the whole model irrelevant. So the pursuit of some
| perfect scientific model of the world is an endeavor with 0%
| probability of success.
|
| Hence, it seems the wiser strategy is to have a strategic
| balance between religion and science. What that split is, and
| whether it's most advantageous to do so at the society level
| or society of mind level, I don't know.
| replygirl wrote:
| > "Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the
| time." Minsky had heard that one before: "Everything is similar
| if you're willing to look that far out of focus.
|
| this breaks down when you remember that contemporary science
| emerged in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries out of the
| work of people like newton and kant who saw themselves as
| engaged in a (partially) theological pursuit.
|
| > You're not allowed to ask, 'Who made God?'
|
| this is actually a pretty active inquiry in theological
| circles, and one of the sources of difference between Christian
| sects. although us Christians tend to frame it more from a
| creationist perspective as "what sort of entity is God and what
| bearing would that have on the way we see God's creation and
| custodianship of the world". much like with science, faith does
| not preclude curiosity for the reigious.
| [deleted]
| EliasY wrote:
| Minsky's subsequent book called "the emotion machine" probably
| has some of the most complete treatments of topics like
| intelligence, understanding and consciousness.
| randomsilence wrote:
| This seems like a constructive approach:
|
| >This course is an introduction to the theory that tries to
| explain how minds are made from collections of simpler processes.
|
| Whereas, at least in parts, the brain seems to work
| 'reductively': [1]
|
| >In fish...
|
| >"Contrary to expectation, the synaptic strengths in the pallium
| remained about the same regardless of whether the fish learned
| anything. Instead, in the fish that learned, the synapses were
| pruned from some areas of the pallium -- producing an effect
| "like cutting a bonsai tree," Fraser said -- and replanted in
| others."
|
| Could it be that we need other forms of thinking than mere
| 'analytical thinking' to come up with a full understanding of the
| human mind?
|
| [1] Scientists watch a memory form in the brain of a living fish
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30572633
| trash_cat wrote:
| We need to clarify what is meant by constructive.
|
| There is the theory that the mind is a construction of culture.
| Essentially we use tools (such as maps or fingers to count)
| which are external to us, later become internalized. It's an
| oversimplification but the point being is that you need other
| people for minds to develop, and this development happens
| through culture. [1]
|
| The thing that we talk about here is the property of Emergence.
| [2]
|
| "In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence
| occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts
| do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge
| only when the parts interact in a wider whole. "
|
| [1] https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-
| encyc...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
| Thursday24 wrote:
| Goes well with the nicely formatted, media enhanced web version
| of the book here: http://aurellem.org/society-of-mind/
| pupperino wrote:
| We wouldn't have gone through the "are neural networks
| conscious" bit of discourse if more people read this book.
| kemitchell wrote:
| Thanks so much! I treasure my dead-tree copy, and had no idea
| this existed.
| l0c0b0x wrote:
| Oh, thank you!
| Simplicitas wrote:
| Thanks for sharing this
| gjvc wrote:
| This is an incredible lecture series, and one to watch if you
| ever catch yourself taking MIT OCW for granted. (This is a figure
| of speech and not necessarily to be taken literally.)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _The Society of Mind_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12050936 - July 2016 (2
| comments)
|
| _Marvin Minsky 's Society of Mind Lectures_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10971310 - Jan 2016 (6
| comments)
|
| _The Society of Mind (1988)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8877144 - Jan 2015 (6
| comments)
|
| _The Society of Mind Video Lectures_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8668750 - Nov 2014 (10
| comments)
|
| _Marvin Minsky 's "The Society of Mind" now CC licensed_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6846505 - Dec 2013 (2
| comments)
|
| _MIT OCW:The Society of Mind (Graduate Course by Minsky)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=856714 - Oct 2009 (2
| comments)
| breck wrote:
| I love Society of Mind. I read it concurrently with A Thousand
| Brains by Hawkins. It seems like modeling the mind as a multi-
| agent system is a productive approach.
|
| I was also recommended Minsky's later Emotion Machine, which I'm
| reading now (thanks DK for the pointer!).
|
| Open to other pointers for related work!
| humanistbot wrote:
| Remember: Minsky organized academic conferences at Jeffrey
| Epstein's private island. Virginia Giuffre testified in a 2015
| deposition in her defamation lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein's
| associate Ghislaine Maxwell that Maxwell "directed" her to have
| sex with Minsky.
|
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-unsealed-docum...
| colordrops wrote:
| Read the first few chapters, and I'm hooked. If this were a
| course when I was in college I would have been all over it.
|
| I suspect with the mind and also life, we will eventually come to
| the conclusion that they are just human constructs, and either
| everything is conscious/alive, or everything inanimate, depending
| on how you look at it. Similar to how Goedel found the boundary
| of math and Wittgenstein philosophy.
| zwkrt wrote:
| He gets a little into the weeds at the end of it, but you would
| probably enjoy the first couple chapters of Spinoza's ethics.
| In the book he's trying to create a solid quasimarhematical
| foundation for ethics based in his understanding of how the
| human mind relates to its outside world. His conclusion is that
| the world of the mind and the world of external reality run
| parallel to each other. He 'solves' Descartes's mind-body
| problem by saying there is no problem, they are just two
| totally separate ways of talking about the same thing.
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