Marvin Minsky - The Emotion Machine

We have many different ways to learn, and also can learn new ways to learn.

We can often postpone a dangerous action and imagine, instead, what its outcome might be in some Virtual World.

Our language and culture accumulates vast stores of ideas that were discovered by our ancestors. We represent these in multiple realms, with metaphors interconnecting them.

Most every process in the brain is linked to some other processes. So, while any particular process may have some deficiencies, there frequently will be other parts that can intervene to compensate.

Nevertheless, our brains still have bugs. Similarly, in the coming decades of research toward Artificial Intelligence, every system that we build will keep showing unexpected flaws. In some cases, we’ll be able to diagnose specific errors in those designs, and hence be able to correct them. But when we can find no such simple fix, then we will be forced instead to evolve increasingly complex systems in which each process needs to be supervised by various Critics. [edit] And through all this, we can never expect to find any foolproof strategy to balance the advantage of immediate action against the benefit of more careful, reflective thought. Whatever we do, we can be sure that the road toward designing ‘post-human minds’ will be rough.

Acerra 1999: Francesca Acerra, Yves Burnod and Scania de Schonen, European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Bruges (Belgium), 1999, ISBN 26000499X, pp. 129-134. Text at http://www.dice.ucl.ac.be/Proceedings/esann/esannpdf/es1999-22.pdf

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Augustine 397: The Confessions, Book 10. Text at http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/saints/augcon10.htm#chap10.

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Bowlby 1973b: John Bowlby, Separation p26 and p59. Basic Books, N.Y. 1973 ISBN 0465-076912

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[Ref. To Memes?]

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

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