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visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. 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.
