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From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: emergent properties
Keywords: pleasure, stoicism, self
Message-ID: <3565@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 4 Oct 90 05:23:31 GMT
References: <3499@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <1990Oct3.183522.17076@riacs.edu> <3549@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <45348@apple.Apple.COM> <3560@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <14517@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT AI LAB, Cambridge MA
Lines: 45


kirlik@chmsr.UUCP (Alex Kirlik) says,

>  I presume you don't mean thinking for thinking sake (whatever
> that might mean) but thinking as it serves choice, ultimately as it
> serves behavior and its attendent consequences.  Evolutionarily,
> thinking could have only evolved only if it contributed to successful
> behavior in some way, and this is the "reason" we have "thinking."
> Now to continue along these lines, thinking serves successful behavior
> and is therefore glorious to the extent of its contribution here.

Well, I was more concerned, not with choice and success in general,
but with finding things out.  Like, two hundred years ago, no one
would have understood what Alex said, about why thinking might have
evolved.  

But then Alex pursues a different track:

> Now here's where I have problems.  What measure are we going to use
> to measure success, that is, who has got the inside track on what I
> should value, what the "utilities" in my choice engine should be?
> Will an understanding of the mind/brain assist in this task?  I think
> not.  I can choose to live in an ugly barren place or I can choose to
> live in what I take to be a beautiful place.  Now you come along and
> tell me don't choose the beautiful place, you only think it's
> beautiful because those ancient curve detectors are firing up a storm,
> and hey you're a smart guy, you want to rise above that kind of
> thinking don't you?  For the life of me I don't see why should.  So I
> like pea soup, I like a flower, I like to copulate. Who are you to
> tell me what I really *should* like.

I actually had a point to make that illuminates this problem, though
it doesn't solve it.  I wasn't telling you what to do.  I was saying
something quite different: that maybe you might say to yourself, "Am I
really liking this?  What am "I", indeed?  When one part of my brain
"likes" something very much, is it possible that there are other parts
of my brain -- maybe much <larger, better, more evolved -- whatever
you think>> that are being suppressed, put out of it, deprived of life
and liberty etc.  Ask yourself (as some stoic philosophers did, I
suspect) -- "Who are those little proto-mammalian pleasure centers in
my brain to tell me what I really *should* like.

So I wasn't saying what to do, only suggesting that you look more
thoughtfully at what may already be telling "you" what to do.  Don't
let your mind kick you around.