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The Society of Mind is a book and theory of natural intelligence as written and developed by Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky is an United States Cognitive Science in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy....
.

step-by-step process, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence which is built layer by layer from the interactions of simple parts called agents, which are themselves mindless. He describes the postulated interaction
Interaction

Interaction is a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another. The idea of a two-way effect is essential in the concept of interaction, as opposed to a one-way causal effect....
s as constituting a "society of mind", hence the title.

The book
The book, published in 1988, was the first comprehensive description of Minsky's society of mind theory, which he began developing in the early 1970s.






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The Society of Mind is a book and theory of natural intelligence as written and developed by Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky is an United States Cognitive Science in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy....
.

Minsky's model

In a step-by-step process, Minsky constructs a model of human intelligence which is built layer by layer from the interactions of simple parts called agents, which are themselves mindless. He describes the postulated interaction
Interaction

Interaction is a kind of action that occurs as two or more objects have an effect upon one another. The idea of a two-way effect is essential in the concept of interaction, as opposed to a one-way causal effect....
s as constituting a "society of mind", hence the title.

The book


The book, published in 1988, was the first comprehensive description of Minsky's society of mind theory, which he began developing in the early 1970s. It is composed of 270 self-contained essays which are divided into 30 general chapters. The book was also made into a CD-ROM version.

In the process of explaining the society of mind, Minsky introduces a wide range of ideas and concepts. Minsky develops theories about how processes such as language
Language

A language is a form of symbol communication in which elements are combined to represents something other than themselves. Language can also refer to the use of such systems as a general phenomenon....
, memory
Memory

In psychology, memory is an organism's mental ability to store, retain and recall information. Traditional studies of memory began in the fields of philosophy, including techniques of mnemonic....
, and learning
Learning

Learning is acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, Value s, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesizing different types of information....
 work but he also covers concepts such as consciousness
Consciousness

Consciousness is a difficult term to define, because the word is used and understood in a wide variety of ways, so that it frequently happens that what one person sees as a definition of consciousness is seen by others as about something else altogether....
, the sense of self
Self (philosophy)

Self is broadly defined as the essential qualities that make a person distinct from all others. The task in philosophy is defining what these qualities are, and there have been a number of different approaches....
, and free will
Free will

The question of free will is whether, and in what sense, rational agents exercise control over their actions and decisions. Addressing this question requires understanding the relationship between freedom and Causality, and determining whether the laws of nature are causally deterministic....
; Because of this many view The Society of Mind as a work of philosophy.

The book was not written to prove anything specific about AI
Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science which aims to create it. Major AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents,"...
 or cognitive science
Cognitive science

Cognitive science may be concisely defined as the study of the nature of intelligence. It draws on multiple empirical disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, sociology and biology....
, and does not reference physical brain structures. Instead it is a collection of ideas about how the mind and thinking work on the conceptual level.

The theory


Minsky first started developing the theory with Seymour Papert
Seymour Papert

Seymour Papert is an Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician, computer science, and education. He is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, as well as an inventor of the Logo ....
 in the early 1970s. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks.

Nature of mind

A core tenet of Minsky's philosophy is that "minds are what brain
Brain

The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate, and most invertebrate, animals. Some primitive animals such as cnidarian and echinoderm have a decentralized nervous system without a brain, while sponges lack any nervous system at all....
s do". The society of mind theory views the human mind and any other naturally evolved cognitive systems as a vast society of individually simple processes known as agents. These processes are the fundamental thinking entities from which minds are built, and together produce the many abilities we attribute to minds. The great power in viewing a mind as a society of agents, as opposed to as the consequence of some basic principle or some simple formal system
Formal system

In logic, a formal system consists of a formal language together with a deductive system which consists of a set of inference rules and/or axioms....
, is that different agents can be based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results.

This idea is perhaps best summarized by the following quote:

See also

  • Cognitive psychology
    Cognitive psychology

    Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology that investigates internal mental processes such as problem solving, memory, and language.The school of thought arising from this approach is known as cognitivism which is interested in how people mentally represent information processing....
  • Cognitive science
    Cognitive science

    Cognitive science may be concisely defined as the study of the nature of intelligence. It draws on multiple empirical disciplines, including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, sociology and biology....
  • Distributed cognition
    Distributed cognition

    Distributed cognition is a theory of psychology developed in the mid 1980s by Edwin Hutchins. Using insights from sociology, cognitive science, and the psychology of Vygotsky it emphasizes the social aspects of cognition....
  • DUAL (cognitive architecture)
    DUAL (cognitive architecture)

    DUAL is a general cognitive architecture integrating the connectionist and symbolic approaches at the micro level. DUAL is based on decentralized representation and emergence....
  • Meme
    Meme

    A meme is a unit or element of culture ideas, symbols or practices; such units or elements transmit from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena....
  • Self-awareness
    Self-awareness

    Self-awareness is the concept that one exists as an individual, separate from other people, with private thoughts and individual rights. It may also include the understanding that other people are similarly self-aware....
  • Situated cognition
    Situated cognition

    Situated cognition describes a perspective of human cognition that asserts learning happens as human beings interact with the living world. Also referred to as the "situativity theory of cognition" , it is a theory of thinking as mainly "on the fly" and "in the moment," rather than off line and mainly in our heads....
  • Theory of mind
    Theory of mind

    Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states?beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.?to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own....


External links and references

  • Book by Minsky, Marvin The Society of Mind ISBN 0-671-65713-5. Simon and Schuster, New York. March 15, 1988.