Philosophy Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Self, philosophy: the concept of the self cannot be exactly separated from the concept of the I. Over the past few years, more and more traditional terms of both concepts have been relativized. In particular, a constant nature of the self or the I is no longer assumed today. See also brain/brain state, mind, state of mind, I, subjects, perception, person._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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Marvin Minsky on Self - Dictionary of Arguments
Minsky I 39 Self/software agents/artificial intelligence/AI/Minsky: Even if our old ideas about the mind are wrong, we can learn a lot by trying to understand why we believe them. Instead of asking, What are Selves? we can ask, instead, What are our ideas about Selves? - and then we can ask, What psychological functions do those ideas serve? When we do this, it shows us that we do not have one such idea, but many. We exploit these beliefs whenever we solve problems or make plans. I'll refer to them, rather vaguely, as a person's self-images. In addition to our self-images, our ideas about ourselves also include ideas about what we'd like to be and ideas about what we ought to be. >Conflicts/Minsky. Minsky I 42 One function of the Self is to keep us from changing too rapidly. Each person must make some long-range plans in order to balance single-purposeness against attempts to do everything at once. But it is not enough simply to instruct an agency to start to carry out our plans. We also have to find some ways to constrain the changes we might later make — to prevent ourselves from turning those plan-agents off again! If we changed our minds too recklessly, we could never know what we might want next. We'd never get much done because we could never depend on ourselves. Minsky I 50 The idea of a single, central Self doesn't explain anything. This is because a thing with no parts provides nothing that we can use as pieces of explanation! Then why do we so often embrace the strange idea that what we do is done by Someone Else — that is, our Self? Because so much of what our minds do is hidden from the parts of us that are involved with consciousness. >Consciousness, >Explanation, >Analysis, >Complexity, >Simplicity._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Minsky I Marvin Minsky The Society of Mind New York 1985 Minsky II Marvin Minsky Semantic Information Processing Cambridge, MA 2003 |
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Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2024-04-16