Philosophy Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Mind: The mind is the set of faculties responsible for thought, emotion, perception, and consciousness. It is often contrasted with the body, or physical matter. See also Consciousness, Spirit, Thinking, Thoughts, Brain, Brain states, Body, Identity theory._____________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 Mind - Dictionary of Arguments
Minsky I 42 Mind/artificial intelligence/AI/Minsky: How do we control our minds? Ideally, we first choose what we want to do, then make ourselves do it. But that's harder than it sounds: we spend our lives in search of schemes for self-control. We celebrate when we succeed, and when we fail, we're angry with ourselves for not behaving as we wanted to — and then we try to scold or shame or bribe ourselves to change our ways. But wait! How could a self be angry with itself? Who would be mad at whom? >Self/Minsky, >Soul/Minsky. What makes us use such roundabout techniques to influence ourselves? Why be so indirect, inventing misrepresentations, fantasies, and outright lies? Why can't we simply tell ourselves to do the things we want to do? To understand how something works, one has to know its purposes. 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._____________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 2024-04-19