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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Thought/Emotion/Feeling
Summary: "cleaning up" the right hemisphere
Message-ID: <7301@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 89 02:17:21 GMT
References: <1380@tank.uchicago.edu> <43583@linus.UUCP>
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
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In article <43583@linus.UUCP> bwk@mbunix (Kort) writes:
>
>I, for one, would love to clean up my inefficient and erratic
>right-hemisphere and install some decent code.
>
This reminds me of a remark from a letter (74) by Rilke expressing his
reaction to the goals of psychotherapy:  "If my devils are to leave me,
I am afraid my angels will take flight as well."  Granting that you HAVE
the sort of right hemisphere you want to "clean up" (and I tend to agree
with Minsky that one should be suspicious of such brain division), what
makes you think cleaning it up will improve its performance?  One of the
nice things about THE SOCIETY OF MIND is the way it makes cases for the
necessity of indirect connections among the agents, as opposed to the more
direct links one might find in an efficient and reliable dataflow network.
That architecture may be "inefficient and erratic;"  but it's robust!  How
many pieces of efficient and robust hardware do you know?