Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!nih-csl!lhc!adm!cmcl2!yale!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!media-lab!minsky
From: minsky@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: "Emotion" vs. "Understanding" (was: Re: emergent properties)
Message-ID: <3679@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
Date: 12 Oct 90 12:56:51 GMT
References: <3549@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <45348@apple.Apple.COM> <3560@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU> <3129@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <15268@venera.isi.edu>
Reply-To: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Organization: MIT Media Lab, Cambridge MA
Lines: 35

In article <15268@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:

>As I recall, time is not a major issue in THE SOCIETY OF MIND.  (Minsky will
>surely correct me if this is an oversight.)  On the other hand, time is very
>much an issue in his essay "Music, Mind, and Meaning."  There, the dynamics
>of interaction between mind and the music which passes by the ears seems to
>be of critical importance.  How does the mind keep up with all those stimuli?
>How to the stimuli help or hinder the mind in its efforts to keep up?

I did discuss two such issues.  Once we give up the single-self idea,
we see that there can be no such thing as "momentary mental time" --
and no such thing as the "here and now" of pre-scientific thinking.
The brain has many different parts.  What happens in part A cannot
affect part B in less than a certain minimal time -- normally of the
order of milliseconds -- because of nerve-transmission time.  But in
some situations, the times will be much longer than that, because of
gating by brain-wave mechanisms, etc.  Who did that classic research
on speech + nonspeech perception, in which random clicks were
perceived as closer to phrase-boundaries than they really were?  The
point is that each sub-agency of the mind can - and must - construct
its own model/theory of what happened recently.  

The other point, discussed in section 17.9, is that different agencies
have different time-scales for changing.  You can become "attached" to
another person (or thing) on one time scale; this involves building
some memory-structures; but modifying those structures may take much
longer.  Thus some of Konrad Lorenz's "imprints" are never erased.
This could explain aspects of various human phenomena of "mourning",
and of "infatuation"; situations in which one part of your mind is
attached, while another is not, and perhaps actively trying to prevent
the interference or influence of those memory/processes.

Anyway, distrust arguments based on "here and now" experience, unless
they are accompanied by some sort of systems description of how
they're suppose to work.