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From: minsky@ml.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: Anthrobotics Website Up (w/comm. re SOM)
Message-ID: <1996Jul28.001203.10078@media.mit.edu>
Keywords: AI,autonomous,Minsky,machine-translation,learning
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References: <4tdmfg$2p5@globe.indirect.com>
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 1996 00:12:03 GMT
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In article <4tdmfg$2p5@globe.indirect.com> marty@indirect.com (Marty
Stoneman) suggests reading his website
>	http://www.anthrobotics.com/anthrobotics/
which has a section of comments on "The Society of Mind"...

I'm afraid I didn't find his comments very useful: mostly he complains
that my theories are too complicated,and proposes ones that are too
simple.  Certainly it would be nice to have a much simpler, more
unified theory of the mind.  That's what Newell thought, too, so
"physics envy" is not confined to beginners.  If there is a good
unified theory of cognition, then someone should eventually discover
it, but that doesn't say what to do in the meantime -- and wishing
won't make it so.

Stoneman rejects my theory of how why physical pain is disturbing and
distracting (because it depresses our ability to pursue our longer
range plans) -- because, he says, that doesn't explain the effects of
other kinds of frustrations, depressions, and social rejections. In
fact, it could explain some of that, but certainly not all of it. It
appears that he missed my discussion of "adult emotions' which
suggests that "infantile emotions are comparatively simple in
character and that the complexity of adult emotions results from
accumulating networks of mutual exploitations. In adults, these
networks eventually become indescribably complicated, but no more so
than the networks of our adult "intellectual" structures. Beyond a
certain point, to distinguish between the emotional and intellectual
structures of an adult is merely to describe the same structures from
different points of view." The reviewer is mixing up different
meanings of the word "pain".  A better question would be to ask why
people use the same word for all those things; that suggests that
there's a common element, and my idea was that one element what makes
them all "hurt' is the inability to solve problems when you lose
control over your high level mental resources.

He complains that I don't like to give precise definitions of commonly
used words.  Yes, that hurts too, at first, but if he doesn't like
this he should consider the several sections of arguments that support
this approach.

I can't understand his comments that seem to say that all a machine
needs is to "learn", so there's no reason to remember anything about
the times or events when one learned things.  He also complains about
my use of the words "memory" and learning", although I clearly explain
that these are untidy popular suitcases, and I deliberately replace
each of them by a variety of different mechanisms and processes.
Instead, he seem to suggest that everythin can be explained in terms
of correlation.  That's a good start, to be sure, but soon you find
that there are too many branches of that tree.

Much of his essay consists of complaints that I have too much
"weight of authority".  Oh, well.

  

