Marvin Minsky, age 88,
the legendary pioneer of Artificial Intelligence died
on January 24th, 2016. Twenty years prior, when I was
first imagining Closer to Truth, and fantasizing about
world-renowned thinkers who might appear, Minsky was
on my A-plus wish list. Marvin personified what I'd
hoped Closer to Truth to become visionary, insightful,
rigorous, fearless. I wanted to do what Marvin did -
challenge conventional belief, taking our topics seriously,
but not ourselves. Timorously, I invited Marvin
to participate, asking him to fly across country to
a small PBS station in Orange County, CA, KOCE. I prepared myself for
rejection, more likely for no response at all, Marvin
accepted immediately! This special episode is a
tribute to Marvin Minsky, one of my intellectual
heroes along my journey, striving to get... Closer To Truth. I first met Marvin in 1999,
during the inaugural season of Closer To Truth, then a
roundtable discussion. Minsky appeared in three
episodes; a fuselage of profound and provocative assertions,
penetrating analysis eccentric in the best sense - no
posturing, no pretensions. In general, I think if you put
emphasis on believing a set of rules that comes from somebody
who's an authority figure, then there are terrible dangers. Most of the cultures exist
because they've taught their people to reject new ideas. It's not human nature,
it's culture nature. I regard cultures
as huge parasites. I think each person
has a lot of potential. I want people to be very
unhappy that they don't understand cosmic string
theory or something. I hate happiness because
that means that you're not interested in anything. So, you would have society
be less, but that would make you more. Yes, if we can get
happiness down to one... That would make you a ten... ...Everybody will be
very busy and happy in a less superficial sense. I like the idea of having
more options rather than less, there are all sorts of ways
mankind could end up forever locked in some particular way of
looking at things, but it seems to me, none of them
could be very good. That's why we need
progress and understanding. There must be something better
than all the things that humans have done so far. I loved listening to Marvin,
it didn't matter whether he defended what I believed or
attacked what I held dear, I wanted more. So, in 2006, when
Producer/Director Peter Getzels and I began restructuring Closer
to Truth, Marvin Minsky was among our first interviews. This time, one-on-one at MIT. Marvin was incisive and fiery,
even on the edges of knowledge, no topics were off limits. I'd braced myself for his
scintillating, idiosyncratic and often radical ideas on
the nature of the cosmos, on the inner workings of
brains and minds, on how we might achieve immortality. What a treat. We started with
brains and minds. While most neuroscientists
are interested in how the brain cells work, to me, that's pretty
much like trying to understand a computer from how
the transistors work. It's many, many levels of
organization below the important things that distinguish a
human from a crayfish or a snake or whatever. And I'm interested in the
question of how this piece of machinery, the brain, can do
things like remember what it's been doing in the past and
can decide that what it's doing didn't work. How does it develop new goals? And, most important, how does
it make a model of itself as a being in a world and think about
its own future and its past and its relatives and this
very high level stuff? And those are questions that
neuroscientists don't like to talk about very much because
they see that as too futuristic, too vague, too high level. Most of psychology for the last
hundred years has been concerned with explaining how an animal
reacts to a particular situation or condition, the idea that
maybe the brain is like a big table of instructions which say
if this happens, do that and if this happens, do that. Then the interesting question is
an animal is born with a bunch of those, but how does it
learn new ones and what kind of experiences will it cause
it to behave in certain ways? Does a person imagine things
that aren't real and how do you react to an imaginary scene? We can do things in our head
that have very little connection with the real world, so,
you can't understand a computer even if you know
everything about its circuits, about how its transistors work. You really need to know what the
procedures are and the programs. The ordinary words of popular
psychology like emotion and feeling and thinking and so
forth, are hundreds of years old, and each of them is a
clever way society has developed to not think about
what's going on. For example, what
does feeling mean? Well, when somebody
is angry, it's silly to say that's emotional. The way I look at the mind
is that there are hundreds of different processes that
you can engage in any time. So, what happens when
someone is angry? They turn off their ability
to look ahead in the future. They turn on a lot of little
resources that make you act quickly, and you can move more
rapidly and with more strength, but you don't plan
ahead so much. You remove most of your
diplomatic abilities, so, and you get red in the face,
which is a more physical process, and, if you're lucky,
it will intimidate the person so that they'll go away. You might start a fight,
so it's risky. So, anger is a way to think. For a long time, people have
said, well, let's think of the mind as being two kinds
of things, emotional and intellectual or conscious versus
unconscious or rational versus intuitive, and these are
what I call dumbbell theories. So, people say, well, how
could a machine be emotional, as though there were
something mysterious and special called emotions? A popular view is that, well,
ordinary thinking is like logic. It's rational. It's cold. It's colorless. And emotions are something
mysterious like adding color to a black and white drawing. Well, there's nothing
mysterious about that. I think the problem is
that there isn't really anything called rational. Everything depends on what goals
you have and how you got them, and when you talk about a
person being angry or in love or jealous or annoyed,
that's a way to think. It's not different
from thinking. Each so-called emotional state
is a way that the brain is arranged to be, at the moment,
using certain modules or parts and suppressing others. The idea of self... it's
almost a verbal mistake. It comes from the naive idea
that a person is two things, a body and a mind. And we know that the body
changes, but once we just divide into two parts, then it's
easy to say, what's a self? It's a body and a mind,
and you don't break those up. But, are you the same person
you were five minutes ago? Of course not. You're mostly the same. Are you the same person you were
when you were three years old? Well, no. Here's what I think there really
is: we build in our brain a model of what we are, and
the simplest model is a body and a mind. But we don't have
just that model. The beautiful thing about the
idea of self in each person is that we have dozens of them. I have a model. You have a model of yourself
as a member of a family, as a member of a profession. You're a neuroscientist. You're a TV producer,
everything, and these are each different. I feel all those things you said
are true, but I still feel a sense of undivided unity. Well, I think the sense of
undivided unity comes because the first model you made is
that I have a body and a mind. You got that when you were
one year old or two, and that's still there as sort of
the index of the others. But, it's not very
useful except socially. For all everyday purposes,
the idea of self is very important and very wonderful. From a cognitive point of view,
it's a very stupid idea and it's an obstacle to understanding
how our minds work. Brains are exceedingly complex,
Marvin explained them. But, what about consciousness? Our inner sense of
private experience. Marvin, of course, offered
his unique perspective. You have called consciousness
a suitcase word. What do you mean by that? Well, I think the word,
consciousness, is a clever trick that we use to
keep from thinking about how thinking works. And what we do is we take a lot
of different phenomena and we give them all the same name, and
then you think you've got it. If you think in terms of
the brain as a whole bunch of different kinds of machinery
with various connections, then it's easy to see that it would
be very hard for any one part of the brain to know what's
happening in all the rest, there's just too much. Just as the president
of a company. I believe the president
of some technology companies are lawyers. They haven't the slightest
idea what the company makes or how it works, but they know
little things like we're not making enough money. When people use the word,
consciousness, I think it's a very strange idea that there's
some wonderful property of the brain that can do so many
different things such as to remember what you've been doing
recently or remember who you are and so many things like that. But there are hundreds
of kinds of awareness. There's remembering
something as an image. There's remembering
something as a string of words. There's remembering the
tactile feeling of something. Most of the time, you
don't remember those things. And that's what you mean by
suitcase because you take all these dozens of mental
activities and try to stuff them in this one place. Right, and there's no harm in
that for social purposes because it's very good. When a word has multiple
meanings, that ambiguity is often very valuable. But if you're trying to
understand those processes and you've put them all in one box,
then you say, where in the brain is consciousness located? There's a whole society of
scientists who are trying to find the place in the brain
where consciousness is. But if it's a suitcase and
it's just a word for many difference processes,
they're wasting their time. When we analyze all these
pieces of consciousness, is there anything left over
that allows us to go beyond the physical world? Well, the physical world
is everything we know, and if somebody believes that
there's another world that we can't see or measure, they're
entitled to their opinion. But, I think the more you
develop that idea, the more cubic centimeters of your brain
you're wasting with questions that don't make any sense
and can't be answered. If there's another universe
somewhere that doesn't interact with this one, then it's
not physical and it's silly to worry about it. However, if there's another
universe with a thinking machine and it has invisible wires
connected to your brain that change how you behave, then we
want to build new instruments to find it. So, you don't need anything
more other than what we have in our craniums to
explain consciousness? Well, I'd hate to feel that
there's some other world. And, I mean, I worked very hard
to become a good scientist, and I studied mathematics for
many years and finally proved some theorems no one else did. And I felt this
was a great thing. It was wonderful and
it was hard work. Now, if somebody comes along and
says there's a little oyster in the universe and you're
the pearl and some creator gave you this ability,
well, that's very demeaning. I don't want to be dissed
by saying my virtues come from a soul. It's saying nothing we
do has any consequences. There's someone else
just dropping these little gifts on us. It's a terrible idea. What would happen
if you believed it? You wouldn't do anything. Marvin could be brusque
when he rejected an idea he deemed wrong headed. So, I had no doubt that
Marvin would repudiate the idea of a soul. But I wanted to press him. Feel the sting of his critique. People often have a feeling that
if there's something they don't understand very well, they could
attribute it to something else to some kind of essence or
spirit or soul or whatever. And yet, that doesn't help
much because along with it usually goes, "Please don't
ask how the soul works." What are the parts of the spirit
and how do they interact? What is the essence made of
and, what is its structure? These are very important words
because at any particular point in the history of something,
there's some problems that you can't understand, and there's
some problems that you're sure you can't understand. You may be wrong. And that's when you attribute an
essence or a spirit or a soul. The people who talk about a soul
are just people who are too ignorant or unambitious or lazy
or I don't know what insults to hurl at them to say,
"This is a really hard question. It's all very well to say
it can't be answered." But, what do you do
with somebody who says, "This question
can't be answered." You say, "This
is an unambitious, faith-ridden person. Well, they say it not can't
be answered, but can't be answered in principle. No matter how much knowledge
and science advances, it's impossible to answer... But think of the hubris, the
preposterousness of a person who says, "I know this
question can't be answered." That's the strangest thing
for a person to say with a brain with 50 trillion synapses,
he's saying, "I don't know how to do it." To say no one can do it is to
say, "I am so smart that I can predict that nobody else
will ever get a better theory." And that's how I view
those philosophers. They're saying, "I'm so
smart and I can't solve it. Therefore, no one else can." What a strange thing to say. Minsky had no bounds
for his intellect. He'd venture far beyond brains,
minds and souls to the universe and its foundations. Like the radical idea that our
whole universe could be a fake! It's perfectly possible that we
are the production of some very powerful complicated programs
running in some big computer somewhere else and there's
really no way to distinguish that from what we call reality. Maybe we are being
simulated by some rather large, dumb program. Maybe it simulated all of
evolution and it was set up by someone who wanted to
see what would happen on a planet, like Earth. Even if we were simulated,
you might be able to find some technique that would notice some
of the brain of the computer being used that is showing
through a little bit. So, what would you feel if you
found those anomalies so that that indicated that
this was a simulation? I'd be very excited because,
first, it would mean that the universe was more easy to
understand than we had thought and that we might even
find ways to change it. It would also mean though that
our level of reality is not the ultimate reality and that
you can do all your nice little things in our world, but that
you'll have no understanding of what the real reality may be. Yes, and that might be a great
thing because otherwise we have to say is this all there is, so,
wouldn't it be nice to know that we are really part
of a bigger universe? When you look at the world,
what do you think are the things that really exist? It's hard to know what to do
with the word exist because after a career in computer
science, we know how to make simulated worlds and we wonder
what it's like to be in them. Now, you could ask, do the
animals, or do the people in these simulated
computer games exist? And if you were to look inside
you'd find that usually they don't have any minds at all. I think in the next 20 years the
characters in the computer games are going to get more and more
complicated and eventually they may have several levels
of cognitive activities. So, now you could ask do those
people exist and you could say, no, they're just
simulated in the program. But eventually, maybe they'll
have programs as large as those in our own human brains and
those processes do everything that we can do. So now, you could ask for all
we know, you and I don't exist in a physical sense. We're just being simulated by
a very big computer somewhere. So, you can't ever
know that you exist. You might be a simulation. Or maybe we're just what a
program would do if the computer were turned on and it's not
even running because it has the same logical possibilities. But, how could we not be turned
on even if we're a simulation? First, it could be a program
that's running on a computer. Second, it could be a program
that some programmer is just thinking about. Third, it could be a program
that nobody has even thought of, just one of the
possible programs. And that's where I think we
have to stop, but that's the only kind of existence
that makes sense because the others are trivial. It's the process itself that's
the real thing and it doesn't have to exist in
any ordinary sense. It's just possible. So, you're defining
real as possible. Anything possible is real,
but there is no independent sense of reality. Yeah, so, I wouldn't use
the word real at all. I think it's obsolete
and unnecessary. However, it makes sense to
talk about what's happening in this universe, which is
the one that we're stuck in. So, if we could be living in a
simulated universe controlled by some kind of super-beings,
what about living in an actual universe created by
some kind of God? I couldn't have imagined Marvin
believing in such supernatural things, but I couldn't
help asking him why? Let me ask you about the
spiritual world, the world of souls or God or angels or
things that many people believe populate an immaterial world. I don't see any use for the
spread of religion has been an amazing phenomenon for thousands
of years, and it seems to me, it's psychologically
a wonderful device. Take all the questions you can't
answer and give them a name. So, some body says,
"well, God did that." And the right question
to ask then is, "well, how does God work?" And they regard that as rude. So, there's something
strange about theology. It's a system of thinking
which teaches you not to ask questions. And so, I think it's basically
incompatible with science. When we grow up, our
parent is gone and there's no one to teach us. But, we still have that slot
in our brain for the marvelous creature who's going to give
us the knowledge we need. And you might as well call it
God or Satan, or whatever is your local religion. So, we're built with an
instinct to look for someone to tell us what to do. And that was the main way we
learned for our first five years and it's still there. And I think it should
be removed at some point. But nobody has found the place
in the brain where this is and found out how to remove it. The trouble with religion
is it picks particular things, like, why are we here? Or, what created the world? Or, what should we do
in various conditions? And lots of these can be studied
and understood a little better by thinking more. But, our cultures find ways -
and it's the cultural rather than the individual who say,
"We like things as they are. Don't think about this. Don't change it. What you should do
is told by this book." And that's very convenient. It saves a lot of time. At any period, if there are
questions science can't answer because there are no tools,
then why knock yourself out? The only trouble is that, most
of the time, those questions could be answered
if you knew more. Like, what happens after death? Well, we don't need death. There's no reason why
people should die right now, we know lots of genes
that cause disease. In a hundred years, we'll know
a dozen genes that cause aging. Maybe people will live
for 400 years then. Shortly after that, we'll find
ways to put our minds into machines and then you can make
backup copies and live forever. Religion is why we couldn't
do this 2,000 years ago, because mainly,
it stopped science. Believing in God is why
we're all going to die today, whereas if we had promoted
science instead of God, we'd all be immortal today. Isn't that a funny paradox? So, if you look at
the short-term effects of religion, they're great. They make stable societies,
except when they go crazy, which is frequent. And they save a lot of trouble
and they do social services. In the long term, they
guarantee death and they're very bad for us. And almost everyone who's alive
today is eventually going to die because the 2,000 years
in which science did not progress didn't happen. So, I think death will go
away and we don't need to pray for it. We have to work for it. Always provocative, Marvin's
views were as incisive as they were disruptive. I recalled that in 1999, when
I had first spoken with him, I asked Marvin to distinguish
between reason and faith. Most religions, the idea is
that, well, there are certain questions we can't decide in any
such way, and so, it's important to have faith. And if you're very good at
having faith, then it means you're not so good
at critical thinking. I asked Marvin what
people think about his outspoken,
unconventional ideas. I don't care very much what
other people think about me. So, it's hard to intimidate
me in that sense, unless it's Richard Feynman or someone,
and it doesn't matter that he's dead. I have a very good copy of him,
and if I say something too speculative, I can hear him say,
"Well, what would be the experiment for that?" What about an organizing
principle to characterize Marvin Minsky's way of thinking
I'd select, "How does it work?" Well, to me, the word "sure"
is when a cognitive process has turned off all other
processes that can cast doubt on a particular statement. Being sure is not being sure. Being sure is a process saying,
"I'm not going to change my mind for a long time." I myself am not a reductionist,
I do not expect the mind to ever be explained entirely by the
brain, nor do I reject outright the existence of God. And things beyond the physical,
to me, are not impossible. Yet, I would rather listen to
Marvin argue against my views, than to almost anyone
arguing for my views. Marvin had heavy-duty opinions,
he was a strong atheist. But, irrespective of one's
beliefs, one can appreciate - dare I say, enjoy his disarming
candor and blunt insights. A personal favorite? Unless you say how God works,
saying that God exists doesn't explain anything. If there is a God, I'd be
disappointed if Marvin isn't one of God's favorites. Marvin Minsky personified
the kind of incisive, unambiguous thinking
that Closer to Truth celebrates philosophers and scientists
of all manners of belief, unbelief, and nonbelief. It may be 100 years before
history can assess the role that this one human being played
in transforming our world. The impact of Artificial
intelligence, so pervasive, so woven into the social fabric,
would not be what it is had not Marvin Minsky been among us,
to bring us... closer to truth. For complete interviews
and for further information, please visit
www.closertotruth.com
