Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis.tis.llnl.gov!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!usc!venera.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Mind is What Brains Do? Summary: trying to clear some of Minsky's air Message-ID: <8372@venera.isi.edu> Date: 16 May 89 16:47:56 GMT References: <3244@tank.uchicago.edu> Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 151 In article <3244@tank.uchicago.edu> cs_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes: > >This group looks like it needs a new controversy, so... > Apparently Bob Kohout regards Minsky-bashing as an appropriate source of controversy. Having put a fair amount of time into trying to make sense of THE SOCIETY OF MIND, I would like to rise to his challenge (which he probably expected me to do). However, I think it is important to set a few matters straight about Minsky's role in the AI community. My first observation is that, while I do not travel around very much, I have yet to encounter a gathering of AI practicioners who would come out and say that they take Minsky seriously. (At one site--which I shall leave unnamed out of a sense of discretion--where I led a seminar, I was strongly urged not to mention K-lines. The most acceptable phrase I was told to use would be "something that looks like K-lines.") So if Bob is under the impression that the AI community is now fanatically worshipping at Minsky's temple, he is quite mistaken. An interesting sign of this is that our most prestigious journal, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, has not yet run a review of THE SOCIETY OF MIND. This is about to change, hopefully. The reason for my own intense study of Minsky's book was to write that long-overdue review. I do not think my editor will mind if I share my final paragraphs with this bulletin board, because what one gets out of a book is very dependent on the attitude one brings to that book. Therefore, I think it is important to dwell upon who a book like THE SOCIETY OF MIND should be approached. Here is how I ended my review: The reader should next accept the fact that this book is more a source of QUESTIONS than of ANSWERS. In PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY, Susanne Langer wrote: The way a question is asked limits and disposes the ways in which any answer to it--right or wrong--may be given. Many of the questions which Turing first raised in 1950 became side-tracked with the pursuit of artificial intelligence as a concrete" discipline. THE SOCIETY OF MIND is an effort to get the questions of artificial intelligence "back on track"--Turing's track, at least. Because the emphasis is on questions, rather than answers, the reader should also approach some of the more flamboyant declarations of this book with caution. Often their intent is more to provoke than to inform. (Maturana calls such sentences "triggering perturbations.") For example, Minsky's theory about split brains, as articulated in Section 11.8, is at odds with certain results in the published literature. [Added as a footnote: I wish to thank Bob Kohout for pointing this out to me.] Unfortunately, Minsky does not provide citations to either support or rebut his own point of view. For better or for worse, he seems to have assumed that the interested reader will pursue such references on his own. Nevertheless, taken on its own terms, this is a very exciting book . . . perhaps the most exciting book ever to have been published on the subject of mind. It is provocative in the questions it raises and challenging because it does not provide cut-and-dried answers to those questions. Ultimately, it serves the most important function which any book may serve: IT INSPIRES THE READER TO THINK ABOUT THESE MATTERS ON HIS OWN. Such books are rare in ANY subject. We should all be thankful that Marvin Minsky has been able to serve the discipline of artificial intelligence so well. > >Take for example, Marvin Minsky's recent claim in "The Society of Mind" >that "Mind is what brains do". This effectively reduces one of the greatest >mysteries of human thought to a question which Minsky believes can be >answered completely within his own field. Minsky's position is not only >arrogant and in violation of one of the very principles Minsky pushes at >us in "Society of Mind" (namely, that we should be skeptical of simple >explanations); it also betrays a terrible ignorance of the nature and history >of the philosophical question "What is Mind?" It seems to me that Minsky >wishes to use AI to accomplish with Epistemology what Skinner tried to >do to Psychology with Behaviorism. In both cases, we see an attempt to put >a discipline of rational inquiry on a 'sound, scientific basis' by simply >eliminating from consideration all of the problems which are not easily >addressed empirically. > In light of my opening remarks, I would claim that this paragraph is basically a misreading of Minsky's text. While I can appreciate that there are those who would read "Mind is what brains do" as a gesture of arrogant reductionism, I do not think the text of THE SOCIETY OF MIND supports that claim. Rather, the book asks us to go back to that question of just what it is that brains ACTUALLY DO. It is not so much a matter of ignoring what philosophers have had to say about mind as it is an observation that if one gets too immersed in the philosophy of mind, one might lose touch with how the brain is actually contributing to human behavior. All Minsky has done is to introduce a new perspective for the consideration of those questions which have occupied so many philosophers of past and present. The fact of the matter is that, after one has read Minsky, one can go back to Descartes, Berkeley, Hume, Husserl, and Wittgenstein (to name a few) and reconsider their observations, their hyptotheses, and their intellectual struggles. Now how many books do we read which encourage such a review of past accomplishments? >I do not think that it is a coincidence that this same Marvin Minsky is >also largely responsible for having derailed research into neural networks >to the extent that one could fairly say he set the field back at least 10 >years. This is an example of attributing far too much political power to Minsky. The greatest enemy of neural network research has always been inadequate computing facilities . . . both powerful hardware and accommodating software environments. The Rosenblatt camp was "stuck in the bits" of extremely clunky equipment. They could raise the occasional spark, but they lacked the facilities to turn it into fire. Even today, with much more powerful equipment, achievements remain disappointingly modest. > >I have also read accounts of Minsky himself admitting that he may have gone >a bit too far, that he saw himself as trying to counter a connectionist >hysteria, and that he didn't intend to kill it. This comes, of course, >only after it is apparent that what we now call PDP isn't going to die >an easy death. It's unfortunate that he is put in the position of having >to defend himself for having misled so many people. I for one certainly >don't intend to accuse him of that, not because I believe him for an instant, >but because one really can't blame him if he managed to make fools of so >many. One can only blame the fools. > I do not think it has ever been Minsky's intention to make fools of his readers. If anything, I fear that he expects too much of his readers: He expects them to THINK OVER his provocations rather than swallow them whole. The fools are the ones who are not willing (or able) to allow Minsky the respect of such thought. Unfortunately, they also tend to have the loudest voices. >The fact is that Minsky succeeded because the large majority of AI researchers >wanted Minsky to be right, not because he was. What makes you think that Minsky succeeded? Have you any idea what the level of research activity is that is based on THE SOCIETY OF MIND? I have already given my visiting seminar anecdote. As another metric, I would invite you to look at the preliminary Technical Program for this year's IJCAI. I think you will find that there is NOT ONE paper which is, in any way, a product of Minsky's "vision." Minsky is currently spending more time at the MIT Media Lab than at the AI Lab. THERE I have seen some attempts to apply his work to music, but it is still very early stuff. It hardly constitutes a massive wave of AI research! > >It seems to me the absolute absurdity to claim that self is an illusion, >which is essentially what Minsky would have us believe. I think this is again a misreading. If you look in Minsky's glossary, he is actually calling it "the myth that each of us contains SOME SPECIAL PART that embodies the essence of the mind" (my emphasis). It is not the "self" that is the illusion, rather the belief that self is some distinct component of body. I see nothing wrong with Minsky questioning this belief. In retrospect, I think that Bob has reacted in a way consisted with Minsky's intentions. He has obviously not swallowed the contents whole. He is clearly giving a lot of thought to what Minsky actually wrote, and even misinterpretation can count for serious thought. I, for one, wish more people were reading Minsky with Bob's intensity.