Marvin Minsky: The Emotion Machine

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

Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity, (1933).

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

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

Thus Einstein’s E=Mc 2was only a small variation of Newton’s E=Mv 2, but led to major changes in the ways that we then could understand the world.

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

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

Paraphrased from §11.8 of SoM.

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

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

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

The American philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916), in The Philosophy of Loyalty, 1908, Vanderbilt Univ. Press, 1995,ISBN0-8265-1267-4

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

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, ISBN0-8101-1313-9

Encarta World English Dictionary © 1999 Microsoft Corporation.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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 ISBN0-19-850365-2

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

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.

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

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.

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’.

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