''The Society of Mind'' is both the title of a 1986 book and the name of a theory of natural
intelligence
Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can b ...
as written and developed by
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, an ...
.
In his book of the same name, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence step by step, built up from the interactions of simple parts called ''
agent
Agent may refer to:
Espionage, investigation, and law
*, spies or intelligence officers
* Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another
** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
s'', which are themselves mindless. He describes the postulated
interaction
Interaction is action that occurs between two or more objects, with broad use in philosophy and the sciences. It may refer to:
Science
* Interaction hypothesis, a theory of second language acquisition
* Interaction (statistics)
* Interactions o ...
s as constituting a "society of mind", hence the title.
The book
The work, which first appeared in 1986, was the first comprehensive description of Minsky's "society of mind" theory, which he began developing in the early 1970s. It is composed of 270 self-contained essays which are divided into 30 general chapters. The book was also made into a CD-ROM version.
In the process of explaining the society of mind, Minsky introduces a wide range of ideas and concepts. He develops theories about how processes such as
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of met ...
,
memory
Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...
, and
learning
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, value (personal and cultural), values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machine learning, machines ...
work, and also covers concepts such as
consciousness
Consciousness, at its simplest, is sentience and awareness of internal and external existence. However, the lack of definitions has led to millennia of analyses, explanations and debates by philosophers, theologians, linguisticians, and scien ...
, the sense of
self
The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhood ...
, and
free will
Free will is the capacity of agents to choose between different possible courses of action unimpeded.
Free will is closely linked to the concepts of moral responsibility, praise, culpability, sin, and other judgements which apply only to actio ...
; because of this, many view ''The Society of Mind'' as a work of philosophy.
The book was not written to prove anything specific about
AI or
cognitive science, and does not reference physical brain structures. Instead, it is a collection of ideas about how the mind and thinking work on the conceptual level.
The theory
Minsky first started developing the theory with
Seymour Papert
Seymour Aubrey Papert (; 29 February 1928 – 31 July 2016) was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificial ...
in the early 1970s. Minsky said that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks.
Nature of mind
A core tenet of Minsky's philosophy is that "minds are what
brain
A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a v ...
s do". The society of mind theory views the human mind and any other naturally evolved
cognitive
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, ...
systems as a vast society of individually simple processes known as ''agents''. These processes are the fundamental thinking entities from which minds are built, and together produce the many abilities we attribute to minds. The great power in viewing a mind as a society of agents, as opposed to the consequence of some basic principle or some simple
formal system
A formal system is an abstract structure used for inferring theorems from axioms according to a set of rules. These rules, which are used for carrying out the inference of theorems from axioms, are the logical calculus of the formal system.
A form ...
, is that different agents can be based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results.
This idea is perhaps best summarized by the following quote:
See also
*
Cognitive psychology
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...
*
Cognitive science
*
Consciousness Explained
''Consciousness Explained'' is a 1991 book by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, in which the author offers an account of how consciousness arises from interaction of physical and cognitive processes in the brain. Dennett describes consciou ...
*
Distributed cognition Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.
From cognitive ethnography, Hutchins argues that mental representations, which classical cognitive s ...
*
Divided consciousness
Divided consciousness is a term coined by Ernest Hilgard to define a psychological state in which one's consciousness is split into distinct components, possibly during hypnosis.
Origin(s)
The theory of a division of consciousness was touched u ...
*
DUAL (cognitive architecture) DUAL is a general cognitive architecture integrating the connectionist and symbolic approaches at the micro level. DUAL is based on decentralized representation and emergent computation. It was inspired by the Society of Mind idea proposed by Marvi ...
*
Dual consciousness
Dual consciousness is a theoretical concept in neuroscience. It is proposed that it is possible that a person may develop two separate conscious entities within their one brain after undergoing a corpus callosotomy. The idea first began circulatin ...
*
Lateralization of brain function
The lateralization of brain function is the tendency for some neural functions or cognitive processes to be specialized to one side of the brain or the other. The median longitudinal fissure separates the human brain into two distinct cerebra ...
*
Left-brain interpreter
The left-brain interpreter is a neuropsychological concept developed by the psychologist Michael S. Gazzaniga and the neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux. It refers to the construction of explanations by the left brain hemisphere in order to make s ...
*
Parallel computing
Parallel computing is a type of computation in which many calculations or processes are carried out simultaneously. Large problems can often be divided into smaller ones, which can then be solved at the same time. There are several different fo ...
*
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the ontology and nature of the mind and its relationship with the body. The mind–body problem is a paradigmatic issue in philosophy of mind, although a number of other issues are addre ...
*
Self-awareness
In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one's own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia. While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and lifesty ...
*
Situated cognition Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.
Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift ...
*
The Emotion Machine
''The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind'' is a 2006 book by cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky that elaborates and expands on Minsky's ideas as presented in his earlier book ''Society of ...
*
Theory of mind
In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them (that is, surmising what is happening in their mind). This includes the knowledge that others' mental states may be different fro ...
Citations
References
* {{cite book, last1=Minsky, first1=Marvin, title=The Society of Mind, date=1986, publisher=Simon & Schuster, location=New York, isbn=0-671-60740-5, url=https://archive.org/details/societyofmind00marv
External links
''Examining the Society of Mind''on the
MIT Media Lab
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...
''The Society of Mind'' text and video archive
Philosophy of mind literature
Artificial intelligence publications
Society of Mind, The
Consciousness studies
Intelligence
Books about cognition