Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!minsky From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Re: emergent properties Keywords: Sparseness_Theory Message-ID: <3549@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> Date: 3 Oct 90 21:01:21 GMT References: <1990Sep29.213139.2876@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu> Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA Lines: 69 In 1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu, Douglas G. Danforth writes > Every once in a while we reremember that the blue of the sky is truely amazing and not just a consequence of Rayleigh scattering, or that the tug of gravity is just as mysterious whether or not affine connections play a role. I don't agree with that. I don't find the blue sky truly amazing. I do find that it sometimes activates some primitive emotions that I don't understand -- and have trained myself to regard this as more annoying than amazing. This leads me to do more experiments and try to refine existing theories. > My sense-of-self will still be a sense of my-self even when we have the full "explanation" of it (if I live that long). That's an interesting prediction. I bet that it would be wrong, under the condition you mention. My own sense of self has changed a lot after thinking about the "Society of Mind" theory for a long time. I'm not dogmatically asserting that this particular theory is the "full explanation", by the way. Many people have reported changes in their sense of self after developing new theoretical views -- for example, during psychoanalysis. How could that be? Because, I suspect, your "sense of self" is not a true sense, or "in-sight". It is mainly an illusion, partly cultural but not arbitrary, in which the infant builds up certain kinds of theories (basically wrong ones, by the way) about what kind of a being it is. Incidentally, I have the impression that part of the alleged effect of EST therapy is training oneself to regard other people as "mere" mechanisms. Your ego won't be hurt so much if you think of your opponent as a worthless, unattractive, and uninteresting collection of machinery! (And on the other side, I find that some people feel assaulted by the aforementioned "society of Mind" theory -- because they think I'm saying that they are "mere". In my view, a superbly organized trillion-part machine can hardly be considered mere. But a body with a single, structureless, causeless "soul" would indeed be mere -- and I would consider it an insult to be cosidered to be so formless as that. < (Point 2) I sometimes wonder how much our theories are not just recastings of our experience (without great insight). It has happened several times that physicists have found in the mathematics literature exactly the math they need to solve their physics problems. Whence came the mathematics? Was it not from abstractions of earlier physics problems (an historian of science should be able to prove or disprove this conjecture)? Indeed, I have heard science historians argue that much of mathematics came from earlier physics theories. But there is another possibility explained in an essay of mine --- "Communication with Alien Intelligence," in @i[Extraterrestrial: Science and Alien Intelligence,] (E. Regis, ed.) Cambridge University Press, 1985. This is a cute theory based on some experiments with very small Turing machines. It turned out that many of them performed operations that could be interpreted as elementary addition -- while none of them did anything that was "similar" to addition but not exactly addition! What that seems to mean is that the most elementary mathematics -- or, rather, the kinds that humans have historically first imagined -- hold a peculiar position among "all possible mathematical systems". In a sense, they might simply be the ones that are "easiest for a machine to think of". Why, then, might they help in making physics theories? Either because the universe, too, is peculiarly simple -- whatever that means -- or that the simplest theories are (at least ,at first) the most useful ones -- simply because they are the first ones we can use to make any predictions at all...