2. Falling In Love

Summary

在这段视频中，马文·明斯基教授就心理学和人工智能的多个方面进行了深入探讨。他首先讨论了关于“自我”的概念，指出人们倾向于相信思考行为是由身体内部的某种实体完成的，并批判了这一普遍观念。明斯基教授还提到了他对情感和思维方式的词汇量感到好奇，并探索了心理学的发展历程，特别是认知心理学的兴起。他批评了行为主义者简化的心理学模型，并强调了心理学的多样性和复杂性。此外，明斯基还探讨了人工智能的发展，特别是他与西摩·帕珀特共同提出的“心智社会”理论，该理论认为大脑由许多不同的“代理”或“资源”组成。最后，他提出了关于意识和自由意志的哲学问题，并质疑了当前心理学研究的方法，特别是对统计方法的过度依赖。整个讲座贯穿了明斯基对心理学和人工智能领域的深刻见解和挑战性思考。

Takeaways

• 📚 马文·明斯基讨论了心理学和认知科学的发展，强调了对心理现象的多种解释和理论的重要性。
• 🧠 他提出了“心智社会”理论，认为大脑中有多个不同的处理过程或“代理”，它们共同工作形成了复杂的思维和情感。
• 🤔 明斯基对意识和自由意志的概念持怀疑态度，认为这些更多是法律和社会概念，而非物理现象。
• 📈 他批评了行为主义者简化心理学的尝试，认为这限制了心理学的发展，并倡导采用更复杂的知识表示方法。
• 📉 明斯基讨论了科学和心理学的历史，包括为什么科学在某个时期内消失，以及为什么心理学直到20世纪才取得显著进展。
• 📚 他提到了亚里士多德关于心智和情感的理论，认为它们是心理学早期的杰出理论。
• 🤓 明斯基分享了他对科学和创造性思维的看法，鼓励人们追求并分享他们最好的想法。
• 🌐 他讨论了互联网对社会思考方式的潜在影响，包括信息共享的便捷性和群体决策的风险。
• 🤖 关于人工智能的未来，明斯基认为AI领域需要更好的知识表示方法，而不仅仅是逻辑和统计技术。
• 📝 他建议心理学家应该从统计学的泥潭中走出来，更好地理解知识表示的复杂性。
• 🌟 明斯基强调了跨学科合作的重要性，认为心理学、认知科学和人工智能可以相互启发和促进。

Q & A

MIT开放式课程是如何获得资金支持的？

MIT开放式课程通过捐赠获得资金支持。在视频中提到，观众可以通过访问ocw.mit.edu来捐款或查看来自数百个MIT课程的额外材料。

Marvin Minsky在讲座中提到了哪些关于心智理解的流行观点？

Marvin Minsky在讲座中提到，大多数人认为他们不是自己思考的主体，而是他们内部的某个东西在思考。这个观点是关于自我（self）的概念，它嵌入在我们几乎所有的言语和思考中。

Marvin Minsky对于宗教中灵魂或自我的看法是什么？

Marvin Minsky认为，宗教可能利用了关于灵魂或自我的概念，这种观点认为在人复杂的内部存在一个纯净的本质，称为灵魂或自我，这在物理术语中是无法描述或解释的，这是导致人们认为存在两个世界——物理世界和许多其他类型世界的原因之一。

Marvin Minsky认为心理学作为一门科学为何在历史上消失过一段时间？

Marvin Minsky提出，心理学作为一门科学的消失可能与大宗教的兴起有关。他询问为什么科学消失了1000年，并且为什么它又回来了，暗示这可能与宗教的影响和后来科学复兴有关。

Marvin Minsky对于弗洛伊德的批评有何看法？

Marvin Minsky提到，弗洛伊德受到了批评，有人认为他是一个彻底的骗子，从未治愈过一个病人。然而，Minsky认为弗洛伊德从未真正声称治愈过病人，而是提出精神分析可能是了解你真正想法和发现更多关于自己和你的目标的好方法。

Marvin Minsky对于动物的心理学有何见解？

Marvin Minsky提到了Konrad Lorenz和Niko Tinbergen的工作，他们通过观察动物的行为来分析它们。他认为，就像人类一样，当动物表现出愤怒时，我们并不是在描述它们的心理状态，而是在描述它们的行为，因此动物行为学家也是心理学家。

Marvin Minsky对于心理学中的'行为主义'有何看法？

Marvin Minsky批评了行为主义者试图简化情况以找到行为的基本规律的方法。他认为这种方法忽略了心理学的丰富性和复杂性，而且他怀疑是否存在类似牛顿定律或麦克斯韦方程式的心智规律。

Marvin Minsky如何描述心理学的发展历程？

Marvin Minsky描述了心理学从古希腊时期到20世纪的发展，特别提到了亚里士多德、斯宾诺莎、康德、洛克、休谟，以及后来的弗朗西斯·高尔顿和威廉·詹姆斯。他指出，直到20世纪末，心理学才作为一门科学真正开始发展。

Marvin Minsky对于意识的看法是什么？

Marvin Minsky认为意识是一个词源学上的意外，人们用它来指代所有他们不理解的心理方面。他提出，意识这个词在文化中传播开来，但它实际上可能只是一个法律概念，用于区分行为是故意的还是意外的。

Marvin Minsky如何看待人工智能的发展？

Marvin Minsky在视频中提到了他在1950年代末关于神经网络理论的工作，并且他是人工智能领域的先驱之一。他与Seymour Papert共同发展了关于心智的理论，认为大脑是由许多不同的进程或代理组成的，这些代理共同工作以产生智能行为。

Marvin Minsky对于心理学的未来有什么建议？

Marvin Minsky建议心理学家应该从统计学的泥潭中走出来，关注知识的复杂表示。他认为，逻辑和一阶逻辑并不能满足心理学的需求，因为它们不能进行类比，而且过于依赖0或1的二元判断。

Outlines

00:00

📚 MIT开放课程与捐赠介绍

本段落介绍了视频内容的授权情况，提到了MIT OpenCourseWare（麻省理工学院开放课程）及其捐赠方式。提到了捐赠可以支持MIT OpenCourseWare继续提供免费的高质量教育资源。同时，还提供了访问MIT OpenCourseWare的网址ocw.mit.edu，以及一些关于讲座和章节讨论的信息。

05:04

🤔 关于自我与心理学的探讨

Marvin Minsky教授在这一段落中讨论了关于自我和心理学的多个方面。他首先提到了对第一章内容的讨论，包括对爱情等主题的探讨。接着，他谈到了自我概念的普遍性和它在人类语言和思考中的根深蒂固。Minsky教授批评了一些关于自我的宗教观点，特别是灵魂的概念，并讨论了这些观点如何导致人们相信存在物理世界之外的其他世界。此外，他还提到了亚里士多德关于心灵和情感的理论，并提出了对心理学和科学发展历史的问题。

10:06

🧐 心理学的发展历程

在这一段落中，Minsky教授继续深入探讨心理学的历史，特别是亚里士多德之后，直到20世纪初，心理学才重新得到重视。他提到了弗朗西斯·高尔顿、威廉·詹姆斯和西格蒙德·弗洛伊德等心理学家的工作，并对弗洛伊德的一些批评进行了反驳。Minsky教授还分享了他与L.罗恩·哈伯德的一次会面，以及他对弗洛伊德和哈伯德的心理学理论的看法。

15:08

🐟 动物行为学与心理学

Minsky教授讨论了动物行为学对心理学的贡献，特别是康拉德·洛伦茨和尼科·廷伯根的工作。他解释了这两位学者如何通过观察动物的行为来分析它们的心理过程。Minsky教授还提到了他个人对海洋生物行为的观察，以及他对心理学和认知心理学发展的看法。

20:09

🤓 心理学的科学化尝试

在这一段落中，Minsky教授批评了20世纪初期心理学的科学化尝试，特别是行为主义者试图通过简化实验条件来寻找行为的基本规律。他提到了巴甫洛夫和华生的工作，以及他们如何使用条件反射和强化理论来研究动物学习。Minsky教授认为这种方法过于简化，无法充分解释复杂的人类心理现象。

25:13

🧠 心理学与物理学的比较

Minsky教授在这一段落中探讨了心理学与物理学的比较，特别是心理学家试图模仿物理学的定律来描述心理现象。他讨论了这种尝试的局限性，并提出了心理学可能比物理学更为复杂和多样化的观点。Minsky教授还提到了皮亚杰的发展心理学理论，以及他与Papert共同开发的认知心理学模型。

30:16

🌐 心理学的网络模型

在这一段落中，Minsky教授详细阐述了他和Papert提出的心理学网络模型，即“心智社会”理论。他们认为大脑由许多不同的处理过程或“代理”组成，这些代理相互作用，形成了复杂的心理活动。Minsky教授还讨论了大脑的冗余性和灵活性，以及心理学研究的未来方向。

35:21

🧐 意识与自由意志的探讨

Minsky教授在这一段落中讨论了意识和自由意志的概念。他认为这些概念在法律和社会文化中有其作用，但从科学角度来看，它们并不是实际存在的实体。他提出意识可能只是一个用来描述我们不理解的心理现象的词汇。Minsky教授还批评了一些关于意识和自由意志的流行观点，并提出了对心理学理论的期望。

40:21

🤔 思考方式的多样性

在这一段落中，Minsky教授提出了关于思考方式多样性的问题。他挑战听众思考不同的思考、推理或解决问题的方式，并反思我们如何描述和理解这些不同的思维方式。Minsky教授还讨论了心理学和认知科学在理解和分类这些思考方式方面的挑战。

45:22

🧬 进化、行为与决策

Minsky教授探讨了进化如何影响人类行为和决策过程。他提到了关于行为概率匹配的实验，并提出了关于最优策略的讨论。Minsky教授还讨论了个性和情感状态如何影响我们的思考，以及心理学如何帮助我们理解这些复杂的过程。

50:27

🧠 思想、情感与大脑功能

在这一段落中，Minsky教授讨论了思想和情感的区别，以及大脑如何通过不同的神经递质和突触活动来实现这些功能。他还提到了大脑的抑制和兴奋机制，以及这些机制如何影响我们的情绪和决策。

55:27

📚 知识的传播与科学发展

Minsky教授在这一段落中探讨了知识传播对科学发展的影响。他讨论了中世纪的科学停滞，以及文艺复兴时期对古典学问的重新发现。Minsky教授还提出了关于现代社会和互联网如何影响我们思考和分享知识的问题。

00:30

🤖 人工智能与心理学的未来

在最后一段落中，Minsky教授对心理学和人工智能的未来方向提出了看法。他鼓励心理学家从统计学的泥潭中走出来，关注知识的复杂表示。Minsky教授还提出了关于人工智能社区当前趋势的批评，并对未来的研究方向提出了建议。

Keywords

💡意识

意识在视频中被讨论为一个复杂的心理现象，Marvin Minsky 认为它可能是一个法律概念，用于区分行为是故意还是意外。视频中提到，意识一词承载了人们对于心智不理解的所有事物，它与社会责任感和公平性紧密相关。

💡自由意志

自由意志在视频中被探讨为一个哲学和法律上的概念，Minsky 认为从科学角度看，自由意志是一个空泛的概念，因为人的行为受大脑计算的限制。他提出，自由意志可能更像一个社会和法律上的构造，用于判断行为的故意性。

💡心理表征

心理表征是心理学中用于描述个体如何通过心智活动来代表外部世界的概念。在视频中，Minsky 讨论了心理表征的多样性和复杂性，以及它们如何影响我们对自我和他人行为的理解。

💡人工智能

人工智能（AI）是视频中的一个核心主题，Minsky 作为 AI 领域的先驱之一，讨论了 AI 的发展、挑战和未来方向。特别是，他提到了 AI 在模拟人类思考方式方面的潜力和局限性。

💡心理学理论

心理学理论在视频中被广泛讨论，Minsky 提出了关于心理过程和行为的多种理论，包括心理的多个层次和代理（agents）。这些理论试图解释人类行为和认知的复杂性。

💡情感

情感是视频中讨论的另一个重要概念，Minsky 探讨了情感与思考之间的关系，以及情感状态如何影响人的思维方式和决策过程。他提出情感可能是大脑中某些更为固定的思考模式。

💡自我

自我在视频中被讨论为一个心理学和哲学上的概念，Minsky 质疑了自我或灵魂的存在，并探讨了这一概念如何被宗教和哲学利用，以及它在人类文化和交流中的作用。

💡认知心理学

认知心理学是心理学的一个分支，专注于研究心智过程，如思考、记忆、解决问题等。Minsky 在视频中提到了认知心理学的兴起，以及它如何帮助我们更好地理解人类心智的工作方式。

💡行为主义

行为主义是心理学中的一个学派，主张通过可观察的行为来研究心理过程。Minsky 在视频中批评了行为主义者忽视心智内部过程的趋势，并提出了更为全面的心理模型。

💡心理发展

心理发展涉及个体从出生到成年期间心理和认知能力的变化。Minsky 讨论了儿童如何通过与环境的互动发展认知和情感能力，以及这一过程对理解人类心智的重要性。

💡表征学习

表征学习是关于如何通过不同的表征系统（如语言、图像、符号等）来获取和处理知识的研究。Minsky 强调了表征的重要性，并探讨了不同表征方式对学习和思考的影响。

Highlights

MIT OpenCourseWare 提供高质量教育资源的资助信息

Marvin Minsky 关于思维和自我概念的讨论

对传统心理学理论的批评，特别是关于自我和灵魂的概念

Minsky 对亚里士多德关于心灵和情感的早期理论的赞扬

对心理学作为一门科学在历史上的消失和复兴的探讨

关于心理学和动物行为学之间关系的讨论

Konrad Lorenz 和 Niko Tinbergen 在动物行为学上的贡献

对弗洛伊德精神分析法的批评和Minsky个人的看法

关于心理学实验方法的讨论，包括巴甫洛夫和斯金纳的实验

Minsky 对于心理学和认知科学未来的展望

关于心理学中情感状态的复杂性和多样性的讨论

对意识和自由意志作为社会和法律概念的分析

Minsky 对于心理学中使用的语言和思维模式的看法

对于心理学理论中不同思维方式的描述和分类的探讨

对于心理学和人工智能领域中知识表示的重视

Minsky 对于心理学和人工智能未来发展的个人观点和建议

Transcripts

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MARVIN MINSKY: I usually start by asking

if there are any questions.

But I thought I'd say a few things about chapter 1,

and then see if there are any questions.

I can't see the pointer.

Oh, anybody remember how to get Word to [CHUCKLES] make

its pointer not disappear?

Maybe I mentioned this the first lecture,

but I was taken by this cute poem by Dorothy Parker

because the first chapter was about love and stuff like that.

So I tried to get the rights to reproduce it,

and it turned out that she was angry at all her friends.

She must have been a perpetually pissed-off person.

And so she left all her literary rights to the NAACP.

And I called them up for hours and they

couldn't find the rights.

So finally-- so it's in the version of the motion

machine on the web.

But I had to resort to Shakespeare to replace her.

Shakespeare's a slightly better poet,

but he's not as funny as Dorothy Parker.

[CHUCKLES]

So the first chapter starts out--

or, it's mostly about all the things

we don't understand about the mind,

which is almost everything.

And the first discussion is--

well, the whole chapter is making

fun of the most popular ideas.

And the most popular idea of the mind

is that people think that they are not doing the thinking,

but there's something inside them that's doing the thinking.

And it's this idea that there is a self--

is embedded in just about everything we say and think.

And really, it's hard to see how you would do without it.

But if you ask, what is the self?

Then since this idea is so popular,

people begin to believe that there is such a thing

and it takes all sorts of various forms.

And the most dangerous form, maybe,

is the one that religions exploit.

Which is that inside a person, with all their complications,

there's a little pure essence called the soul, or the self,

or whatever you want to call it, and it's

impossible to describe it or explain it in physical terms.

And so that is one of the reasons why

we think there are two worlds--

a physical world and lots of other kinds of worlds.

And each of us has some imaginary model

of what they are and what they're in.

And philosophers talk about it and existentialists, and so on.

So there are lots of problems about our ideas

about ourselves.

And in reading around for half my life,

I was puzzled at the strange ideas that are around.

And in Aristotle, I find the first intelligible theories

of mind and emotions.

So if you look at, in particular, Aristotle's--

there are a number of books and one of them is called Rhetoric.

And it's full of theories about how people reason and influence

each other.

And I'll show you some quotes from that

because when I look at the history

that I've encountered about psychology, sort of Aristotle

stands out as being the first and among the best.

And as far as I can see, there were no psychologists nearly as

good as him.

Of course, we don't know whether there

was a him exactly because he--

what we have of Aristotle is a lot of writing,

but it's all cobbled together by students

from all sorts of manuscripts by other people,

and people who took notes.

And Aristotle claims to have learned a lot from Plato.

Well, we have very little writing from him.

And so there you go-- three centuries

before the Christian era, as it's called.

And then a couple of thousand years later,

you start to find people like Spinoza and Kant

and John Locke and David Hume, who

start to make psychology theories,

very little of which is as good as the ones

that Aristotle has in all his fragments.

So one question that frequently bothers

me, and it should bother everyone,

is why did science disappear for 1,000 years?

And the standard explanation is the rise

of the great religions.

And why did it come back?

And you see with the first signs of anything

like modern science, at least in my view,

with Galileo and Newton--

there a couple of people before that.

There's some people in the Muslim world who

invented some high school algebra,

and they make a big fuss about that.

It looks like Archimedes, in a very recently discovered

manuscript, computed an integral.

He found the volume of a cone, which is--

what is it?

1/6 bh-- I forget.

Anyway, so why did science disappear

and why did psychology appear so late?

Because there isn't much psychology in the modern sense

until 1900, or the late 1800s, with Francis Galton and William

James lived around here.

And Rudolph Fleiss, who--

Sigmund Freud starts writing in 1895.

People make fun of Freud, as I mentioned last week.

But in fact, among other things--

how many of you have read the recent criticisms of Freud,

which claim that he was a complete faker

and never cured a single patient?

This is popular stuff.

I don't believe Freud ever really claimed

to cure a single patient.

So the critics, who are really very ferocious,

claimed that he made up all his data, and so forth.

But most of what Freud says, is that psychoanalysis

might be a good way to find out what you're really thinking,

and discover more about yourself and your goals, and so forth.

And I had the good or bad luck to be

introduced to L. Ron Hubbard by John

when I was an undergraduate.

John Campbell was the great editor of the--

I think it was called Astounding Science Fiction in those days--

what a marvelous title.

And this fairly mediocre science fiction writer, L. Ron Hubbard,

invented a new form of psychiatry called--

what was it called?

AUDIENCE: Dianetics.

MARVIN MINSKY: Dianetics.

AUDIENCE: Dianetics.

MARVIN MINSKY: [CHUCKLES] It's pretty good.

And I'll tell you that story another time.

But John Campbell had Thanksgiving in the Commander

Hotel every year and invited a bunch of friends.

And I don't remember if that's how

I got to meet Asimov and Heinlein, and other people.

But anyway, I did, and science fiction

had a big influence on me from my, actually, early years.

But starting in college, it got very serious.

Anyway, so chapter 1 starts to talk about this phenomenon

of psychology.

And one of the funny parts is this little section, 1.3,

of trying to say, what are emotions?

And I looked up emotions in dictionaries and--

can you all read that?

I don't feel like reading aloud.

But there's lots of discussion of emotions,

and how mysterious and complex they are.

And then the marvelous thing is how many words

there are for emotional states.

I think I got 300, but I don't remember.

Anyway, here's from A to D, and I

don't recall how I found those.

But I think that's a lot.

How many words for ways to think are there?

Now that's a serious question because I complained, maybe,

on the next page.

No, I didn't.

I found myself complaining that there were very few words

for ways to think.

And then this afternoon when I was pruning these slides,

it occurred to me that I didn't really try.

So maybe I just didn't think enough.

So if there are a couple of words for everyday emotions,

if any of you can find me a list of 10 or 20 common words

for styles of thinking, I'd appreciate it.

'Cause I wonder if there are a lot, and if not, why not?

So here is a list of typical situations--

grieving for a lost child, panic at being in an enclosed space.

I'm not sure any of the words in the list of 300

standard emotions are good enough

to describe how you feel for any of these not unusual states.

"Have you ever lost control of your car at high "speed?

No, but when I first learned to drive,

I couldn't believe that you could read signs

at the same time as--

well, anyway.

One of the very best psychologists in history,

or a pair of psychologists, aren't even

called psychologists.

These are two guys named Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen.

And they-- somebody made up the word ethology.

What they study is the behavior of animals.

And in some sense, presumably, they're

studying the psychology of animals

because just as with the person, when

somebody flies into a rage, you're not

describing their mental state.

You're describing something about how they behave.

And so the ethologists, too, are psychologists.

And Tinbergen and Lorenz, starting around 1920s,

started to analyze the behavior of animals in great detail.

And so here's an example of how a certain fish behaves.

I actually forgot which fish it is, but there's

a picture of it some--

in the book.

And at different points in its life, it's in different phases.

And this is just one diagram of a dozen

for this particular fish and its reproduction,

which involves an environment with plants and other things.

And he divides its behavior into parenting, courtship, nesting,

and fighting.

And then, you see each of those as a lot of subdivisions.

And Tinbergen and Lorenz and some students

discovered all these things by sitting in front of fish tanks

and watching the fish for months and years.

Tinbergen also spent years on some beach watching seagulls,

and so he has a diagram like this for a particular class

of seagulls.

When I came to Boston, my friends and I

used to go to Nahant and look at the tide pools there,

where there are a lot of activities,

and it was very interesting.

And I got a big fish tank and imported

all sorts of little animals and plants

from the tide pools in Nahant.

And I watched them for about a year and didn't learn anything.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]

MARVIN MINSKY: And that was before I read Tinbergen.

And then I realized there's something

about those people, which is they could watch a fish

and recognize all sorts of behaviors.

And I would just watch a fish and wonder

whether it was hungry, or--

what?

Wouldn't you get bored swimming back and forth

for three years in a--

anyway.

So here, the great psychologists of our day--

Aristotle, 2,000 years ago, and Lorenz and Tinbergen

in the 1930s, and Sigmund Freud and Galton and William

James around 1900.

And then what went wrong?

There's almost no good psychology

between then and 1950s, when something called

cognitive psychology started.

And it was partly due to people who said, let's make psychology

more scientific.

And you've probably all heard of Pavlov or Watson.

And what happened is, around 1900, some psychologists said,

well, these Galtons and Freuds and William James

are very poetic and expressive and literary,

and they write much better than we do and tells good stories.

But they're not scientists and they don't

do reproducible experiments.

So what we have to do is simplify the situation

to find the basic laws of behavior.

So let's take a pigeon and put it in a vacuum in the dark.

Well-- [CHUCKLES]

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]

MARVIN MINSKY: Well, they didn't go that far.

But they did put it in the dark and there were

two illuminated levers to work.

And you could make a sound and the sound

could be very annoying, or you could

have a bright annoying flashing light, or something.

And the animal would push one of two levers and one of them

would make the stimulus even more annoying and one of them

would make it go away.

And you'd plot curves of how often the animal pressed

these levers so you would get a quantitative theory of how

much he learned and how much it could remember,

and how many trials it would have to do.

And then instead of just looking at reactions to stimuli,

they quickly switched to trying to teach the animal

things by giving it to two alternatives--

turn left or turn right, or push this button or that,

or whatever.

And if they pushed the one you approve of,

then you'd give them a little pellet of food.

And there was a lot of engineering

so that you would make sure that the food got to them right

away.

Because if there were a 10-second delay

between an action and a reward, the pigeon or a squirrel or rat

or cat or dog would learn much less quickly

than if there was a one-second delay.

And anyway, that went on for 50 years,

starting around 1900, Pavlov and his dogs.

And there's a great movie that some guy came around

with that had been taken of Pavlov's lab,

and it shows him sort of like a great dictator, or something.

There's this room with lot of cages and dogs,

and mostly dogs, in this case.

And Pavlov comes in and there are

a bunch of lackeys who sort of bow and scrape

because he's a lord.

And he comes in, and all the dogs

run into the corner of their cages and yelp.

So the Pavlovians tried pretty hard to get

that movie suppressed.

And I haven't seen it in recent years.

But anyway, Fred Skinner, who was a professor when

I was an undergraduate at Harvard,

was the first one to really automate

this experimental psychology, and he invented

what's called a Skinner box.

But it's just a soundproof, light-proof, well-ventilated

and thermally-regulated cage.

And you can put a rat or a pigeon--

those are the most common animals.

They're very inexpensive because they're free.

No one knows much about dolphins.

They've been studied for 50 years.

Whenever John what's-his-name-- remember the name of the great

dolphin--

AUDIENCE: Lilly.

MARVIN MINSKY: Lilly-- thanks.

He discovered a lot about dolphins

and a certain amount about their communication,

and a little bit about whales.

But there's an interesting mystery--

I forget which whales, but some whales have a 20-minute song,

and they repeat it for a whole season.

And next year, that song is a little bit different.

But it goes, essentially, without repeating--

it's very complicated--

for 20 minutes.

And people have studied that a lot and no one

has the slightest idea of what it means.

And nobody even has any good conjectures, which bothers me.

But I think it probably means is this, when there's

a whole bunch of fish somewhere for one of these whales,

it might be 200 miles away, and it's very--

whales eat a lot.

And it's very important to find where the fish are.

And I believe this message, which

changes a bit during the season, might be telling you

where the food is on the Atlantic or Pacific coastline

in great detail.

Because if somebody finds a lot of fish somewhere,

you have to swim 300 miles.

And if they're not there--

so anyway, it's interesting that John Lilly

got a lot of publicity, but he didn't discover squat.

And finally, the dolphin studiers

gave up because nothing happened.

Anybody have heard anything in--

I haven't paid any attention for 20 years.

Have you heard of anybody discovering anything

about dolphins except they're very good at solving

a lot of physical problems?

Anyway, that's-- I'm bothered by the mystery of why was there

some psychology in Aristotle's time?

And why didn't it get anywhere till 1950,

when there was regular psychology,

but it was afflicted by what I call, physics envy.

Namely, you run into people like Estes

and-- well, he was pretty good, actually.

But there a lot of psychologists who made up things,

like Maxwell's equations for how animals learn, and there were

generally three or four laws.

And if there's a sequence of events,

then animals remember a lot about the first few

and the last few in the sequence.

They don't remember much about the middle.

And of course, the reliability of their memory

depends a lot on how recent it was

and on how powerful the reward was, and blah, blah.

And so they get these little sets

of rules that look like Newton's laws,

and that was the kind of sort of psychological physics

that the so-called behaviorists were mostly looking for.

This was not what Tinbergen and Lorenz did because they wrote

books with extensive descriptions of what

the animals did and made little diagrammatic guesses

about the structure of the subroutines and sub-structures.

Anyway, end of history, but it's a nice question--

why do some sciences grow, and why was psychology just

about the last one?

I suspect it could have been earlier,

but people tried to imitate the physicists and tried to say,

maybe there's something like Newton's or Maxwell's laws

for the mind.

And they found a few, but they weren't enough to explain much.

So there are a lot of questions.

When Seymour Papert and I started

thinking about these things, which was really around 1960,

I had been working on some ideas about AI in the late 50s.

And my PhD thesis was a theory of neural networks,

which was sort of interesting, but never really went anywhere.

I went to a meeting in London somewhere and gave a talk

about a theory of learning that was based

on some neural network ideas.

And there was this person from South Africa named Seymour

Papert who gave the same paper.

And I hope this happens to you someday.

Find somebody who thinks so much like you, only

different enough that it's worth it.

And that you only have to say about three words a day,

and some whole new thing starts.

Because we really did write the same paper

and it had the same equation in it.

And he had been working for Piaget,

who was the first great child psychologist.

I should have mentioned Piaget, who probably discovered

more things about psychology than any other single person

in history.

And there are lots of people now who

say he was wrong about point 73 because children

learn that at the age of 2 and 1/2 instead of 2 and 3/4.

I'm parodying the Piaget critic community, but it's pretty bad.

And I think those poor guys are uncomfortable because John

Piaget published 20 books full of observations about children

that, as far as I know, no one had made systematically before.

And in his later years, he started

courting algebraic mathematicians because he

wanted more formal theories.

And in my view, he wanted to make his theories worse.

And nothing much happened, but he did visit here

a couple of times and it was really

exciting to meet the starter of a whole new field.

Anyway, Papert and I discussed lots of things.

And somehow or other, we kept finding other--

more ideas about psychology.

And it finally gelled into the idea

that, well, if you look at the brain,

you know that there are several different brain centers.

What's all that stuff for, and how could it possibly make

any sense to try to explain what it does in terms

of four laws like Newton?

Like, how does a car work?

Is there a magical force inside the engine

that causes the wheels to turn?

No.

There's this funny thing in the back

to cause a differential so that if the car isn't going

in a straight line, the two wheels going

at different speeds won't rip the--

if the two wheels were going at the same speed,

the tread would come off in 5 minutes.

You ever wonder what a differential is for?

Well.

So most of the car is fixing bugs in the other parts.

That's most of the brain is because we started out as fish,

or lizards, or whatever you like.

And making the brain bigger wouldn't

help much because you just get a heavier

lizard that had to eat more and would think more slowly.

So size is bad.

But on the other hand, if you need

another cubic inch of brain to fix the bugs in the other part,

then the evolutionary advantage of being smarter

had better make you able to catch

a little more food per hour.

And so each person is an ecology of these different processes.

And the brain reached its present size

about a million years ago, I guess.

What's the current guess?

Anybody been track-- they keep discovering

new ancestors of humans and I don't have the patience

to read about them because you know that next week, somebody

will say, oh, that isn't in the main line

and you were just unlucky to discover that skeleton.

So anyway, Papert and I and a lot of students

gradually developed this picture that the mind

is made of lots of processes, or agents, or resources,

or whatever you want to call them.

And it's anybody's guess what they are.

If you look at the anatomy of the brain,

you know that people label regions,

so it's very clear that this occipital lobe back here is

largely concerned with vision.

But I forget where the one for hearing is.

If you destroy the part of the brain

for hearing in some animals, you get a little bit

of increased function in some part of the visual system that

seems to enable the animal to hear a little bit

and make some reactions.

And there's a whole lot of hype--

I think you have to call it--

about the flexibility of the nervous system.

That is, if certain brain areas get destroyed,

other parts take over.

They almost never are as good.

And mostly, many functions never get taken over at all,

but are replaced by ones that superficially seem similar.

And so there's a whole lot of, I guess,

wishful thinking that the brain is immensely resourceful

and error-correcting and repairing.

I think there was some idea that there was a general phenomenon.

But if you do some arithmetic, you

get an interesting result. Suppose

that each function in the brain occurred in 10 different places

at random.

Then, if you removed half the brain, how many functions would

you lose?

Well, almost no arithmetic tells you

you would lose about one part in the 1,000.

And so, in fact, you would never be able to detect it.

So this idea that the brain has enormous redundancy--

well, now change that number to five.

Suppose each function is somewhat

supported in five different parts of the brain.

Then if you take off half the brain, then--

what am I saying?

One part in 32 chance of losing some significant function, so

probably lots of things that we do

are supported in several parts of the brain.

Apparently, the language center is pretty unique,

and some others.

But be careful about the conclusions you

read from optimistic neuroscientists.

Anyway, Papert and I worked on this idea

of how could these large numbers of different processes

be organized?

And we made various theories about it.

And then around, I guess, the late 1970s,

we stopped working together.

And Papert developed his revolutionary ideas

about education, which, certainly,

have had a lot of influence, although they

didn't sweep the world in the way we had hoped.

And I kept working on the society of mind theory,

and we didn't work together so much.

But we still did plenty of criticizing and supporting

of each other.

Anyway, my theory ended up with this idea that--

it's sort of based on Freud.

I don't know if I kept a picture of his here.

Freud concluded that the mind was an interesting arena,

sort of.

And he had the mind divided into three parts.

At one end of the mind, which we inherited

from most other animals, is called

the id, which is a bunch of instinctive, mainly

built-in behavioral mechanisms.

And a second part of the mind is what

he called the super ego, which is a collection of critics.

So in Freud's first image, the brain is in two parts.

One is a set of instinctive, built-in behaviors

and the other is a set of critics,

which actually are associated with a culture or--

well, with culture and a tradition.

And you learn from other people things that are good to do

and things that are bad to do, and that's

called the super ego.

This is your set of values and standards

and tests for suitable behavior.

And the middle is this strange object

called the ego, which is not what people think it is--

at least Freud's word.

The ego is a kind of big neutral battleground

where the instinctive behaviors--

I keep wanting to--

oh, you can see that arrow if I take my finger off it.

And then gradually, as I kept trying to figure out

how problems are solved and what kind of processes

might be involved, I got this picture, which has six layers.

And various people come around and say,

I don't think you need to distinguish between layers four

and five, or why don't you just lump all

the three top layers into one?

And I sort of laugh quietly and say, these people

are trying to find a physics-like unified minimal

theory of psychology.

And they're probably right, in one sense.

But if they do that, they'll get stuck.

Because if you get a new idea, there'll be no place to put it.

So if you have something that's very mysterious,

don't imitate the physicists.

Because if you make a theory that's exactly right and just

accounts for the data, and there's

nothing extra and nothing loose, then

when you notice a new phenomenon, like dark matter,

then the physicists don't know what to do.

Should they regard dark matter as some obscure feature

of space-time, or does it have something

to do with this universe being near another one

that you can't otherwise communicate with?

And it's all very puzzling.

But there are lots of things that don't fit

into Newton's laws these days.

And I'm not suggesting a six-layer theory of physics,

but it might be worth a try.

OK.

So what am I--

I made up some nice slides.

But I think I'll stop.

So who has some questions, and what would you

like to see in a theory of psychology?

What do you want to be explained?

A lot of people are convinced that there

are some really serious problems and mysteries,

like what is consciousness?

And if you look at chapter 4, my feeling

is consciousness is an etymological accident,

that people got a word which is a suitcase for all

of the things they don't understand

about the mind and more.

But once you've got a word and it goes in the culture--

consider the word consciousness for a minute

from a legal point of view.

Supposing you happened to be walking along

and you're carrying something--

where is that pointer--

and it happens to stick somebody's eye out.

Then it's very important when they

sue you to establish whether you meant to do it,

or whether it was an accident.

Did you consciously plan to--

I can't think of the English word

for putting somebody's eye out.

There's beheading and all sorts of--

AUDIENCE: Gouge?

MARVIN MINSKY: Gouge is a good word.

AUDIENCE: Impale?

MARVIN MINSKY: Yeah.

So anyway, it's very important, for social reasons,

to have a word for whether an action was deliberately

violating the rules, as opposed to accidentally violating

the rules.

Like if you tripped on the stairs and landed on somebody

and broke their neck, that's not a crime

unless you were so clever as to make

it appear that it was an accident,

and probably-- anyway, you see what I mean.

So we need a--

our whole system of fairness and ethics

and social responsibility is based

on the distinction between whether an action was

deliberate or not.

And so, did he do that consciously--

is a word for that.

And somehow, the idea of conscious became elevated.

Well, that's a very superficial--

you can probably think of 10 other reasons why a word like

that--

yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] in terms of your writing, I--

it seems to be that there is both sides of the argument,

both sides of it.

But [INAUDIBLE] it seems [INAUDIBLE] in that--

I can well imagine is lack of representation.

You have representation of self and representation

of your mind.

But then you say, there's no self or no consciousness.

Why can't you think about consciousness

as just a process that is reasoning about your own mind?

MARVIN MINSKY: Well--

AUDIENCE: Is there a problem with that?

I mean, I understand you don't want to talk about--

MARVIN MINSKY: No.

AUDIENCE: --soul, 'cause that's a religious notion.

But--

MARVIN MINSKY: No, but sometimes,

when you say conscious, that is, do you

remember doing it, which is--

AUDIENCE: Yeah, but I don't I load up my process with--

asks me what I think about my own mind?

And then I retrieve that and I say, yeah, I do remember it.

MARVIN MINSKY: Well, you're right, actually.

I went to a lot of trouble to find 25 or 30 different uses

for the word consciousness.

And probably, if I--

or if one of us worked harder, we

could take those and condense them

into five or six much better ones that account

for more stuff than the 30.

AUDIENCE: Well, I think you got five right there-- ideas,

goals, memory, thoughts, and feelings, so--

MARVIN MINSKY: That might be just right for something.

Who knows?

[CHUCKLES] Yes, well, I think that's a great criticism

of one reason why people don't like these theories quite so

much, because I proposed too many things.

I really should reprint that criticism from Restak,

or hand it out, because it's this neurologist who

says, why is he telling us all these things about K-lines

and representations, and so forth?

And the answer is, he's from the community that doesn't

have enough variety yet.

And I'd be the first to admit that I

try to go overboard and think of five more things

than are in the literature.

But that emotion thing is nice.

Remember that was a serious challenge

because when I made that list--

[CHUCKLES] I do have a laser pointer somewhere--

in my jacket, probably.

How many words for at least noticeably distinct ways

of thinking, or reasoning, or figuring out, or solving

problems can you think of?

Maybe there are 20 or 30.

I just realized this afternoon that I never looked.

I don't remember where I got this list.

Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Can I ask about your perception of free will?

And I gather from the readings that you

don't have a strong sense of free will,

and so what is that--

MARVIN MINSKY: I think it's the same

as the one for consciousness--

namely, it's a legal concept.

The idea of free will is completely obscene, isn't it?

What could it possibly mean if you did something

for no reason?

So it's a thoroughly empty idea, isn't it?

Or what do you mean by it?

Do you mean there's nobody ordering you around, so you're

free to do whatever you want?

But of course, you're not.

You can only do what your computer computes you to do.

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]

AUDIENCE: So in a sense, in the same way

that you draw the-- you showed the fish diagram, right?

The fish's actions are a product of the environment

in its current state, and it's essentially a Turing machine--

MARVIN MINSKY: Well, it's some kind of machine, yes, sure.

AUDIENCE: And so, would you argue

that we are also Turing machines that are just

running out in the world and--

MARVIN MINSKY: Sure.

I've never heard of any even interesting alternative.

In other words, people who insist on free

will appear to me to be like people

who believe that there must be a god who created the world.

What's the next step?

Who created the god?

They don't take that step.

So if your will is free, OK, then who is controlling it?

There's nothing there.

But legally, it's great.

Because if somebody stole so money of their own free will--

but suppose you were a peculiar kind of epileptic.

And every now then, when you go by--

AUDIENCE: [LAUGHS]

MARVIN MINSKY: --your hand goes out and steals things?

Then they-- what do they do?

They put you on parole?

No, this is very strange.

But if you look at religions, you

see that people make money on them.

13% of the world's product goes to people

who make their living on concepts like free will

and consciousness, so it's a big money thing.

It's not just an accident.

It's an industry.

AUDIENCE: So both of those are concepts of society.

MARVIN MINSKY: They're [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: You could imagine a society

without the concept of consciousness and free will,

but those are [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: I don't think you could.

You'd have to make up something to keep people

in check and under control and to train them.

It's like the rat being--

the rat needs somebody to press the reward or punish button.

And we have it built into our-- our culture works because you

build into people's head the machinery for suppressing

doubt.

And it's very clever.

But you should think of it as an industry rather than

an inexplicable phenomenon.

How much money goes into--

yes?

AUDIENCE: How many ways of thinking can you think of?

MARVIN MINSKY: Say it again?

AUDIENCE: How many ways of thinking

can you think of right now?

MARVIN MINSKY: That's my challenge, in fact.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: There's probably a big list

in some chapter or other.

But there's nothing like this.

What's the trick?

Three-- if I go like that.

Actually, Dragon has a thing so you can tell it,

make things bigger.

How many of you use the new Dragon program?

Speech thing.

I can't believe how good it is.

Oh, I was talking to Henry Lieberman about it earlier.

AUDIENCE: So I'm under the impression

that you would say that the [INAUDIBLE] [? of mind ?]

theory applies both to humans and animals.

Is it just that we have higher levels of organization

than them?

And so where would you draw that line?

Do animals not have a notion of the self the way

you described in the book?

Like long-term planning and stuff?

MARVIN MINSKY: That's a great question.

And it'd be interesting to think about ways to investigate it.

People or researchers are often, in fact,

raising that question of do animals have

a representation of themself?

And there's a famous experiment, but I

can't remember what its current status is,

where you put a red dot on a chimpanzee's head.

And when the chimp passes a mirror and sees that,

the chimp might go like that.

Whereas I don't think a dog, when it passes a mirror,

would rub its forehead to see if it has a red spot.

I had a cat who walked past mirrors,

because we have some full-sized mirrors around the house.

And the cat walks by, and there's

this other cat in the mirror, and she pays no attention to it

whatever.

So of course, I don't know what happened the first three times

she walked by that mirror.

Because if you see another cat going by,

you would think it would--

anyway, it's a good question.

And people ask that.

And there's some evidence that elephants have a model

of themself and maybe dolphins.

Have any of you heard any stories of other animals

that can recognize, for example, when they've been painted?

AUDIENCE: Elephants?

MARVIN MINSKY: Which?

AUDIENCE: You said elephants?

MARVIN MINSKY: Yes, I think elephants.

AUDIENCE: Infants can't [INAUDIBLE]

There's a famous child psychology experiment,

where if you're less than a couple months old,

you actually fail this test.

MARVIN MINSKY: Oh.

AUDIENCE: So it's actually something

that comes as a sign of your child progressing.

So it might not be intrinsic to humanity [INAUDIBLE]

So [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: This is off the topic,

but I once had a great email correspondence

with some woman who was getting a PhD in France

about how babies recognize their mothers.

And she concluded with--

she did experiments, having other people walk

into the room with a mask of the mother or a different hairdo

and so forth.

And for the first two months or three months, I think,

it turned out that the baby recognizes the mother

by the hairdo, which had not been known.

And then, I think after three months,

it's recognizing the mother by her face.

And that point, she's doing experiments

where you get another woman wearing

a copy of the mother's face.

And so now there's two mothers, and the baby

is absolutely delighted.

And then I can't remember, but then I

think at four or five months, when two copies of the mother

comes in, the baby gets really panicked.

So I lost track of her.

If you have a baby, let me know.

She got her PhD for this.

And I haven't heard anything since.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: Here's a half-formulated thought

that I just thought of regarding ways of thinking and ways

of feeling.

So it just occurred to me that it

seems like if you go back to the list of feelings,

it seems like when we talk about feeling,

we're talking about a state that the brain is in.

So it might be a complicated state

that's like some combination of a lot of different parameters.

But it's a state that you can stay in for like an arbitrary

amount of time.

But I think thinking is something

that's more sequential, as in like when you're thinking,

you're necessarily changing the state of your brain

all the time because you're moving bits around.

So I don't know.

I just thought of this.

MARVIN MINSKY: No, I think that's right.

That I think when we talk about intelligent behavior,

you're absolutely right.

What you've got is a process that's

criticizing itself and seeing when you got stuck

and finding things to do.

And I suppose in each emotional state,

you're certainly also thinking.

So that's going on, but maybe it's more restricted.

Like if you're confronting somebody,

and there's a sort of conflict, then

almost all your thoughts are constrained to that subject.

And it's not as resourceful.

But I'm just improvising.

AUDIENCE: Or if you have for each emotional state, when

we say that we're in an emotional state,

does it mean that we're talking about

are the certain switches that get flipped in a certain state,

or something is above a certain threshold.

And you can have thoughts that are

about anything in that state.

But perhaps the state itself influences the type of thoughts

that you're likely to have.

MARVIN MINSKY: OK.

I think what I'm talking about in this context

is sort of extreme forms, where the person

changes into another machine.

Like, an angry person won't listen to reason,

or it's very hard to deflect them,

and so it's this kind of rigid thing.

But humans are generally--

are rarely in such extreme states,

where nothing gets through.

But the whole point of that was that--

I just realize that I maybe was just too lazy--

that we have this huge vocabulary of nuances

of emotional activity.

Also, people think that these are hard to explain

and mysterious and non-physical and blah, blah, blah.

But why don't we wait until next week

and see if somebody comes up with--

or see if we can come up with a set of 30 or 40 words

about intellectual states?

Curiosity-- I just don't know how many there are.

And I haven't thought of any in the last few minutes.

Yes?

Has anybody thought of a couple of--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] like Csikszentmihalyi's concept.

MARVIN MINSKY: What's the word?

AUDIENCE: Flow.

AUDIENCE: Flow.

AUDIENCE: Like Csikszentmihalyi, like when you're really

engaged in some activity that you're doing,

and you're really in the zone.

MARVIN MINSKY: Yes, there's a state of keeping other things

out, so you can focus--

not being interruptable.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: So in this state of mind, you talk about agents

and how they divide between themselves.

But I don't see anywhere about like how evolution

modified a lot agents.

I believe that evolution modified

the way we think right now.

I don't know if you will solve-- there is a paper wrote

like two years ago.

It's called "The Region of Behavior."

And this guy tried to explain how we make some decisions--

evolutionary, like in a point of view of our [? species. ?]

We are maximizing the probability

of really reproducing a self.

But individually, we are not increasing

this [? efficiency. ?] And I think

somehow these agents will be the decisions of agents

or resources would be very determined

by evolution since we have a very long time to of evolution

of the human being.

And somehow, we have hardwired to make some decisions.

So for example, he gives the example of a guy--

MARVIN MINSKY: Well, for lizards, that's certainly true.

But why do [INAUDIBLE]---- humans keep changing

their environment.

AUDIENCE: So for example, yeah, so he uses

this example of tossing a coin.

The guy says that this coin is unfair.

He doesn't say the probabilities.

But there is 75% of getting heads,

and 25% of getting tails.

And we-- like the subjects--

they choose randomly 25% of the time the tails,

even though they can take a count

of the number of the times that you put heads.

And even though if you choose always heads,

you will get more money or whatever, you would

make it the right decision.

MARVIN MINSKY: That's called probability matching,

and it's not a good strategy.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, but if humans do that, like--

MARVIN MINSKY: No-- well, they do it

if a psychologist rigs the experiment very carefully.

It turns out that the best thing to--

what do you think is the optimal strategy?

AUDIENCE: Always choose--

MARVIN MINSKY: No.

The optimal strategy turns out it's

the square roots of the probabilities normalized

to add up to 1.

And I'll give you a proof next time.

This theorem is due to Ray Solomonoff, who invented

inductive probability theory.

AUDIENCE: But evolution--

MARVIN MINSKY: So evolution, if evolution

did probability matching, then it would be wrong.

And I bet you'll find out that those experiments are wrong.

You have to see how did he rig the experiment so that people,

if it's probability 25%, they guess that 25%?

AUDIENCE: They made the experiments

with [? goldfish. ?]

MARVIN MINSKY: I don't know.

There was a theory about why you would expect it.

It's a good question.

I don't think people use probabilities, though.

So even if an experiment shows some,

I would look for a flaw in the design of the experiment.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: So Professor Minsky, you talked a lot about emotions

in today's lecture.

And my understanding is that like for someone

who has this distinct personality,

they might have a predisposition to feel

a certain emotion of like anger, depression, or whatnot.

My question is that if you had any insight or theories

on to what extent our personality is affected

by events or influences that happen to us

over the course of a lifetime.

And to what extent is it impacted

by chemical or biological makeup of our brain?

MARVIN MINSKY: Well, you're asking what do people learn?

We don't care if it's chemical or--

see, if it's chemical, it's still physical.

AUDIENCE: I've read a little bit about treatments

for depression.

And the argument is that a lot of the reasons for depression

is because of some sort of chemical and biological way

our brain is constructed.

MARVIN MINSKY: Well, there's lots of complicated things

about the brain.

One feature of the brain, that I don't know if everybody--

you know that there are inhibitory and excitatory

synapses.

When one neuron connects to another,

the impulse that goes along the axon to the target neuron

may reduce the probability or the strength of its firing

or increase it.

So that's called inhibiting or--

there's no-- or exciting.

That's not quite the right word, is it?

Now, generally in the nervous system, as a rule,

but not always, if you follow a chain of activity,

it goes inhibiting, exciting, inhibiting, exciting.

If you have too many excitatory things,

and there was a loop, then it would explode.

And it would wear itself out in jig time.

So there is this general feature of the anatomy

that you alternate.

So when somebody talks about a drug having

an inhibitory effect, that's sort of weird

because it's inhibiting half the neurons.

And therefore, it's lowering the thresholds of the ones

they're connected to and so on.

I think the best thing is until you

have a diagram of the functional relations

between different brain centers, it

might be best not to try to make generalizations

about how the chemistry works.

It's easy, but people think of adrenaline as a stimulant--

epinephrine.

But in the nervous system, locally, it

may be inhibiting things that are inhibiting something else.

And so it appears to be exciting.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: So I have a problem understanding the difference

between thoughts and emotions.

I know it might be a simple thing.

But the only thing that I can separate in my mind

is that thoughts, let's call it a time constant,

I can change it kind of [INAUDIBLE] Emotions--

the time constant is smaller.

And I can control it again much less.

But since there is no--

and at least in this class, there

is no free will, how can I make a decision [INAUDIBLE]

by my [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: Oh, I think it's a waste of time.

As far as I can see, emotional mechanisms are generally

lower-level, simpler ones than the ones that involve several

layers of the--

more layers of the brain.

So it's just a relative thing.

It's not that some states are emotional.

You're always having some high-level thoughts

and low-level thoughts.

And the distinction--

I just don't know why the distinction

has occupied so much tension.

I think it's because--

and that goes back to having more words for--

or asking how many words do we have for ways to think.

It seems to me that in popular culture,

there are very few words for ways to think

and lots of words for emotions, and so they are very prominent.

Maybe you have to be smarter to distinguish between ways

to think, and people generally are dumb--

not because they're inherently dumb,

but they come from cultures which bully you if you--

what happens if you're in third grade, and you're smart?

You get it beaten out of you, and you learn not to show it.

AUDIENCE: I just think that question of why didn't science

happen earlier?

Why don't we have more ways to describe different ways

to think?

So that's sort of puzzling.

But have we just not reflected as much

on different thinking states or different approaches?

MARVIN MINSKY: I wonder if the Greeks had more when we--

AUDIENCE: I think they did.

I think they had also more concept

of ideas in different states and different potencies.

MARVIN MINSKY: Who has a theory of that?

What's your theory of the Middle Ages?

How could things get dark for so--

so dark for so long?

AUDIENCE: Well, I do have a theory.

[INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: And are we about to have one?

AUDIENCE: I think it has as much to do with the channels

in which one can communicate ideas to other people--

whether they exist or not, or whether we have

[INAUDIBLE] The Middle Ages were characterized

by scientific discoveries being kept as family secrets.

MARVIN MINSKY: Cardano knew how to take cube roots,

and he wouldn't tell anyone.

AUDIENCE: Well, the classic stupid example

is baby tongs, which for 300 years

made a single Italian family very rich.

Using tongs to extract the baby in childbirth

increased the success rate in difficult births by about 10%,

they say.

MARVIN MINSKY: Wow.

AUDIENCE: And that was enough to build a family fortune,

until some servant finally spilled the beans,

and that was the the end of that.

MARVIN MINSKY: Yeah, wow.

So who has a theory of the Middle Ages?

Is there a standard theory?

Yes?

AUDIENCE: Well, the concept of the Middle

Ages as the Dark Ages is something

that emerged mostly in the Renaissance,

when people in the 14--

in the 15th, 16th century tried to present themselves

as going back to the Classical Age of scholarship

of ancient Greece and Rome and as being

better than their predecessors for the last few years.

And this mostly happened because of the discovery of manuscripts

that were translated from the ancient Greek,

and in certain cases Latin, by Muslims, who at the time

were receding from Europe.

So the entire concept of the Middle Ages

might be a fabrication of the Renaissance.

There were some significant discoveries at the time.

MARVIN MINSKY: That's a nice idea.

In other words, when was St. Patrick?

AUDIENCE: St. Patrick?

MARVIN MINSKY: I'm told that he popularized a lot

of technical manuscripts--

brought them back into Europe.

He has two achievements.

One was bringing scientific culture back,

and the other was getting snakes out of England or something--

Ireland.

I don't know which he was sainted for.

Don't you have to do three miracles, or is it--

what's?

Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, my theory is the Middle Ages ended around 2100.

So I guess I'll say after the Middle Ages end, they'll say,

you know, those guys back in the 21st century,

they had no idea how thinking worked.

They couldn't even think of a few ways to think.

They had poverty.

They had wars.

Those guys were barely out of their loin cloths.

MARVIN MINSKY: Right.

I just read a history of AI.

I forget who wrote it.

But it had this section saying--

it mentioned the Newell-Simon--

there was a thing called General Problem Solver, which I mention

a couple of times in the book.

And it's the idea that the way to solve a problem is to find--

it's a symbolic servo--

find the difference between what you have and what you want.

And look in your memory for something that

can reduce that difference.

Keep doing that.

And, of course, it's important to pay attention

to the more important differences first and so forth.

And I'll send you this article.

This article is saying that they made a terrible mistake,

and this was a trivial theory.

And that's why nobody uses it anymore.

And it was interesting how many AI people fell for that idea

in the 1960s.

My complaint has been that if you look in a modern textbook

on--

you must have some in your first volume, Pat.

Didn't you have some GPS things?

AUDIENCE: Oh, yeah [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: If you want to keep up with AI,

you should read Patrick's textbook,

even though people are starting to use this new one, which

doesn't have any AI in it.

Who is it by?

AUDIENCE: Norvig?

AUDIENCE: Russell and Norvig.

MARVIN MINSKY: Russell and Norvig.

It's probably pretty good technically.

But I leafed through it, and it didn't have any--

never mind.

It's probably better than I think because I'm jealous.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: Kind of a different topic.

In The Society of Mind when you're

talking about the amnesia of infancy, when you forget what

you've learned, and things that were once difficult

become common sense.

And you can't even remember how it was you learned that.

So I've just been wondering about the reverse

of that process, when you try and say

teach something to somebody that [INAUDIBLE]

bringing back up the different levels.

I'm not exactly sure if it was a question.

[INAUDIBLE] on it and wondering about

is that itself another way of relearning

the things that we learned?

MARVIN MINSKY: That's sure an interesting question.

When I first learned about programming,

I had the idea that maybe babies think in machine language.

And then after a while, they start to think in Fortran.

And then finally, when they're a little older,

they think in ALGOL or something.

But when they switch from machine language to Fortran,

then they can't remember their earlier thoughts.

And there's almost no evidence of people

finding genuine recollections from two-year-olds

at later ages.

Now, almost everybody thinks they remember something,

but there's the problem that you might

have rehearsed it and translated it

into the Fortran and the ALGOL and the Lisp and the Logo--

whatever it is.

One of my greatest influences was a great mathematician

named Andrew Gleason at Harvard, who I met practically

the first day I got to Harvard.

And he would always talk about things I didn't understand.

And I would go home and look them up and try to.

Anyway, one day, we were talking about number forms.

And number forms are a psychological phenomenon

which about 30% of people have.

And it was first described by Francis Galton.

And the phenomenon is if I ask you close your eyes

and tell me where is the number three, how many of you

have a place for the number three?

Well, that's a few.

And so typically, if you imagine the visual field,

that's a windshield, I guess.

So there are these numbers in there.

They're nowhere in particular, except that it's usually

like that for an older child.

So here are these numbers.

And what's more, in some people, they're colored.

So I was talking to Andrew.

I had read this Galton paper, which

was 1890 or 1885 or something.

And so I was asking people if they had number forms.

And he said, oh, yes, he has one.

And he sketched it for me.

And he said, and they're colored, too.

Oh, and his went way up.

And the prime numbers were bright.

What am I doing?

Maybe the composite numbers were.

Something was bright, and they were colored.

So I wrote this down.

And over the next couple of years,

I would look in antiques stores for old children's blocks.

And I found a set of blocks that matched that.

And Andrew Gleason said that he knows

when he acquired this thing, and it was about four years old.

And he had a window in his house.

And there was a hill.

And he could just see over the sill,

and he imagined these numbers on the side of that hill--

blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, people who don't have a number form

don't know what I'm talking about.

And I don't know if the 30% is still true.

But it's an interesting phenomenon.

And in most cases of early childhood--

well, you can't find out because show children

do remember details of a house they lived in.

But you don't know if they've copied it.

So what was the original question?

How much can you remember from infancy?

L. Ron Hubbard thought you could go back

to before you were born, and you could

remember people talking about you when you were still

in the womb.

So anyway, John Campbell said, you should look into this.

And a few of us made an expedition.

We went down to Elizabeth, New Jersey to visit the just

starting up Dianetics Center.

And I met this L. Ron Hubbard, who had green eyes

and was quite hypnotic-looking.

And the end of the story is he had

been writing about how if you took

this treatment of Dianetics, then

you could memorize an entire newspaper in five minutes

and do all sorts of miraculous things

like that, once your mind has been cleared of aberrations

and obstacles.

And it became a big industry and turned into, later,

Scientology.

I'm sure you've all heard about that.

So we asked Hubbard to look at a newspaper

and tell us what was in it.

And he explained he was so busy training the other people

to be cleared that he hadn't had time to go

through the procedure himself.

And I never saw him again.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: What are your thoughts on memes and the fact

that we're just replicas, or our thoughts

are actually all replicas of something that--

MARVIN MINSKY: Of memes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: You mean Dawkins?

AUDIENCE: Kind of, yeah.

MARVIN MINSKY: I didn't quite get the whole question.

The idea that--

AUDIENCE: Oh, so a meme, so for example, the way we talk

and the way we all talk probably very much

mimics the way our parents talked or people around us

and possibly the way we think as well.

So how does that relate to how our mind develops?

Or are we actually creative original characters,

or are we not?

[INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: Well, of course, it's

both, because you learn things from your culture.

And then you might just mainly repeat things.

Or you might get the knack of making new ideas.

I'm trying to remember what Dawkins's main ideas are.

He invented the word meme to say that the ideas that people have

might be considered to be somewhat

similar to the genes in our heredity

and that societies are systems in which these memes, which

are conceptual units of meaning or knowledge, propagate around

and self-reproduce and mutate and spread.

And I don't know what to say about it, except that it's

obviously true that every now and then,

someone gets a new idea and tells people.

And for one reason or another, they either

forget it or tell someone else.

And after a while, it spreads.

And some of them fill up the whole culture,

and some just die out.

And whatever else Dawkins says, he's a very smart guy.

But almost everything then in my mind

is that he's explaining that religions are mostly

made of these memes, and they're very bad

and cost the world a great deal in progress and productivity.

In other words, he's a militant atheist.

And there are about five bestsellers

in that business today.

But I don't know what else to say about memes.

It's an obviously generally correct idea.

But the great thing about genes is

we know the four nucleic acids they're made of

and how they're roped together and all that.

And I don't think Dawkins's theory

develops anywhere nearly as elegantly as modern genetics.

So it would be nice if it could, but.

A really good theory of good ideas would be nice to have.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: What would it look like?

Someday, we'll have an AI that just punches them out.

AUDIENCE: I think it would [INAUDIBLE] a really

good language.

MARVIN MINSKY: Oh, right.

Robert Heinlein has some stories in which

the super intelligent people have a language that's

so dense that in five syllables, they can explain something that

would take you a half hour.

I forget what it's--

Loglan.

Anyway, if you need a good idea, read Robert Heinlein.

Sure?

AUDIENCE: In [INAUDIBLE] you mentioned

this, where you talked about how geniuses,

they might have just come up with better ways

to think better.

Like, better ways to think--

better ways to learn about how to [INAUDIBLE] learning.

But why do you think they've never mentioned it?

Why haven't they propagated their method

of better learning around how [INAUDIBLE] learn?

MARVIN MINSKY: That's a great question.

And--

AUDIENCE: Do you think [INAUDIBLE]

we don't have like a concept of an idea that

improves better learning?

MARVIN MINSKY: There's a couple of phenomena.

Like, how come there were so many geniuses in Athens?

And then some of the best mathematicians

came from some high school in some little country

next to the Baltic.

Bulgaria?

Romania.

Yes, there was some high school in Romania

that not only produced von Neumann,

but about five or six other world-class mathematicians.

I don't remember the details.

So that's a nice question.

If there are these great memes, how

come there aren't more big pockets of them?

But there are a lot of cultures which

were very inventive in other than intellectual fields.

How come Paris got all those artists?

And how many of you saw the Woody Allen movie?

What's it called?

Paris at Midnight?

It's so funny.

AUDIENCE: Like, would we be able to think of one--

say, one idea that would improve?

Your improvements are popular.

MARVIN MINSKY: Right.

That's a good question for each of us.

What's your very best idea?

And stop fussing with the other ones, and get that one out.

There must be some people who are very quiet

and only speak once in a long time.

We should watch them carefully.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: I guess along those lines,

do you ever feel restricted by language because [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: Wait.

It's the sound.

I can't hear with it.

Is that strong enough to lift you?

AUDIENCE: Let's give it a try.

MARVIN MINSKY: I'm sure someone's done it.

Sorry about that.

AUDIENCE: Oh, do you ever feel restricted by language,

and that you must represent your theory of mind

or any theory or idea with language?

MARVIN MINSKY: No, I don't.

But I once was jealous when Papert explained

that he got some idea, and then he

explained that he gets ideas like that

when he thinks in French.

And--

AUDIENCE: Well, he'd draw pictures, too.

MARVIN MINSKY: What?

AUDIENCE: He would draw pictures, too.

MARVIN MINSKY: Oh, yeah.

AUDIENCE: So it's not just language.

MARVIN MINSKY: That's a language--

graphics.

So we ought to have devices within the next few years

that draw pictures when you think.

It's so funny.

You know, we had cyborgs.

What were they called?

I mentioned them last time.

We had Steve Mann, and who's the other one?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARVIN MINSKY: Yeah.

So there's these two guys around the Media Lab wearing

various things on their head.

And they're always typing.

And you ask them a question, and they've searched Google.

And when was that?

1990?

AUDIENCE: 1995 I think was when Steve Mann was here.

MARVIN MINSKY: But it's all gone.

And nobody walks around with direct connection to the web.

AUDIENCE: Well, Steve Mann still does.

MARVIN MINSKY: Yes.

Anyway, I certainly expected it to turn up--

something worn.

So anyway, you should be able to buy one, one of these days.

And what's her name?

Who was that nice woman who had the EEG thing?

Do you remember at TED?

Forgot her name.

Anyway, she had this sort of helmet,

which had about 20 electrodes.

And she induced me to put it on.

I was on a stage with about 1,000 people

there, which was rather funny.

And there's a little spot on a CRT.

And I get to think about it moving one way or the other

and rewarding it when it did the right thing for only about half

a minute.

And then I could steer it around.

So here was a nice primitive gadget

where you could almost draw just by thinking this spot.

And then she started a company and hasn't sent me

one because maybe it was just beginner's luck or something.

AUDIENCE: It was Tan Le.

AUDIENCE: Tan Le?

MARVIN MINSKY: What?

AUDIENCE: Her name-- Tan Le?

MARVIN MINSKY: Yes, Le.

Yeah.

Did you find the company?

But you would think there would be lots

of people wearing stuff, and--

AUDIENCE: Well, see, she's doing it right now.

AUDIENCE: EMOTIV.

AUDIENCE: EMOTIV.

MARVIN MINSKY: With your keyboard, right.

Why don't we take a five-minute break?

I don't know.

Well, I hate to interrupt because I

see 10 different productive discussions.

AUDIENCE: I know.

MARVIN MINSKY: Yes, I saw quite a few apparently productive

discussions.

Maybe that's what the class needs.

But anybody come to a conclusion?

Yeah?

AUDIENCE: So I was just resting over here.

MARVIN MINSKY: See if you can knock the wall down.

Yeah?

AUDIENCE: It's not a conclusion, but it's a question.

It's a thought experiment.

So if you had a black box that could replace

part of your brain, and let's say

you could replace like 5% at a time.

At what point do you assume that there's this self entity?

At what point would you lose yourself?

MARVIN MINSKY: If you change?

The question is how much do you have

in common with the you of yesterday as compared to when

you graduated grade school?

So this question of--

the idea of identity is very, very fuzzy.

Yeah?

AUDIENCE: So that question sort of reminded me

of these peculiar cases of transplantations

suddenly having preferences like the person they

got the transplant from-- like, heart transplants and stuff.

Somehow, they start to like same foods or use the same words,

or there's odd things like that.

AUDIENCE: Marrying the same spouses.

MARVIN MINSKY: I read a science fiction novel by Robert Sawyer.

Any of you know of him?

A Canadian writer.

And it has to do with somebody who has a fatal disease,

so he's going to die soon.

But the technology is around where you

can make a duplicate of him.

And so he has a duplicate made.

And he is sent to the moon for some reasons I can't remember,

which is a kind of a nursing home for, I think,

people who are enfeebled and do much better with 1/7 gravity.

So there was some reason why.

Anyway, the original copy is sent to the moon,

and the substitute takes over.

But then our hero is miraculously

cured by eating the right stem cells or whatever.

I don't remember.

So he wants to come back.

And the question is, who gets the car?

So I can't remember the title of the novel,

except that it has "alien" in it.

Alienable Rights is not--

something like that.

But I wrote an article called "Alienable Rights."

So are you the same as you were five minutes ago or five years

ago or whatever?

And as far as I'm concerned, the answer is who cares?

It's a sort of silly question because no two things are

exactly the same ever anyway.

But again, a lot of these questions which

look philosophical are legal.

So the joke of that novel is that

who owns the car is what matters to decide

who is the real original and who is the copy.

Frederik Pohl wrote a similar story much longer ago,

where people are copied.

And the copy is sent on a one-way trip

to some planet to fix a broken reactor, and they always die.

And you get a million dollars for providing this copy.

But one of the copies survived, so it's the same plot.

I can't remember the--

if you're looking for a good idea,

if you go to 1950s science fiction,

look for A.E. van Vogt or Frederik Pohl

or all those wonderful writers.

That was before it was necessary to describe

really good characters.

And science fiction got better and better

for the literary critics and generally worse and worse

for the science fiction fans.

Do we really have any more questions?

Yes?

AUDIENCE: So where do you think we [INAUDIBLE]

for sharing information between many people

short amount of time is by using the internet

and everything like this.

Do you think that this will change--

this will bring up many more ideas?

Do you think that this will hinder it?

Because before this time, people had problems

with sharing information.

And also now, it's much easier to get a large group of people

working on one thing.

Do you think that this will change the way that we think?

And do you think that this will make us [? data ?]

[? resource? ?]

MARVIN MINSKY: It's a tough one.

Bad things can happen, and good things can happen.

But that's funny because that reminds me,

again, of science fiction because in science fiction,

many, many years ago, some writers

got the idea that there would be something like an internet.

And some people realized there would be flash crowds.

And now, there are flash crowds.

And I remember even as a kid talking to people who said,

why not wire up the voting machines

so that they're always there?

And so if the somebody in the government

wants to know should we do this or that--

should we bomb China or not--

you could get 100 million people to run up to the keyboard

and say yes or no.

And presumably, when the--

what do they call those?

That great crowd of Jeffersons and Franklins and?

AUDIENCE: The Founding Fathers.

MARVIN MINSKY: The Founding Fathers did a lot of things

to prevent that.

And the one that they focused on which

was one of the most effective was

called the Electoral College.

And the United States is different from other places

because we don't elect congressmen or presidents.

We elect smart people from the community

who then get together and decide who should be president.

And of course, now, if anybody-- now they belong to parties.

And if any of them voted for the other party's candidate,

there would be hell to pay.

But it was a great idea because the Founding Fathers realized

that if you had instant feedback, which is what Hitler

got, then you could say something really exciting,

and everybody would press the "yes" button,

and then you kill all the Jews.

And then the next speech, you kill

all the black people and all the yellow people

and all the people whose last name doesn't begin with M.

And so what you don't want is instant feedback.

Now, the new social networks are getting us close to that.

And the question is, is it time to have--

is it time to stop that?

Is it getting dangerous?

I don't know.

But there must be a lot of people

who are recognizing that this thing is creeping up on us.

And you might be able to get 50 million people

to do something reckless in a few minutes

if you don't put some limits.

I don't think we could get the Electoral College back

because you'd have to get a majority to.

What does it take to fix the Constitution?

2/3?

AUDIENCE: 2/3.

MARVIN MINSKY: We'll never see 2/3 again.

It's the end of America.

Well, we have three minutes.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: If you were to design a direction

for the field of psychology-- and obviously,

more than just a set of debugging tools, what do you

say they should be doing?

MARVIN MINSKY: They should read Patrick Winston's thesis.

The psychologists now have disappeared

into the tar pit of statistics.

And they don't have the idea that knowledge needs

complicated representations.

And I don't care whether you assign probabilities to them

or put them in the order of what you thought of them

or do what Doug Lenat did in his thesis of swapping things when

one worked better than another.

But I forget the question.

But I think we've got to get better

ideas about representation of knowledge.

And I don't know where they're going

to come from now that the whole AI

community is drifting into these ways of avoiding

representations.

I haven't read the Norvig-Russell book.

Can anybody summarize what it says

about knowledge representation?

Who's read it?

AUDIENCE: Well, there's a chapter

on logic and first-order logic.

MARVIN MINSKY: That's so funny.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] logical.

MARVIN MINSKY: First-order logic is

what Newell and Simon thought of in 1956,

before they thought of the so-called GPS thing.

Logic can't make analogies.

It's a very bad thing to get stuck with, 0 or 1.

Maybe one of our papers should be

on what should AI do next year?

9 o'clock.

Thanks for coming.