Marvin Minsky "The Emotion Machine": Introduction

Nora Joyce to her husband James: “Why don't you write a book that people can understand?”

I hope this book will be useful to those interested in the work of human thinking, those who want advice on its development or trying to design smart machines. It will be useful to those who want to learn more about artificial intelligence. As well as psychologists, neurologists, computer scientists, philosophers, as it develops new ideas they are working on.

We all admire achievements in science, art and literature, but rarely recognize our achievements in everyday life. We recognize what we see, understand the meaning of what we heard and can apply accumulated knowledge and experience to solve new problems.

We are also capable of the fact that no other living being can: as soon as our way of thinking fails, we begin to think about our thoughts - such reflexive thinking helps to find a mistake in reasoning and helps to invent new, more effective ways of thinking. However, we still know very little about how our brain copes with this. How does imagination work? What is consciousness? What are emotions, feelings, thoughts? And in the end how we think?
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Compare this with progress in the natural sciences. What are solids, liquids and gases? What is color, sound and temperature? What is force, pressure and deformation? What is the nature of energy? Today, almost all such riddles are explained by several simple laws — the equations of Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and Schrödinger.

It is not surprising that psychologists tried to imitate physicists in their search for laws explaining what is happening in the brain. However, this book claims that it will fail, because there are no such laws, because there are hundreds of parts in each brain, developing to perform a certain type of work: some parts determine the situation, others give signals to muscles, and others form goals and plans. , fourths accumulate and use knowledge. And although we do not know how each part works, we know that their structure is based on the information contained in the genes. Thus, each part of the brain acts under the influence of different laws.

And since we understand how complicated the brain is, you need to act not like physics, but vice versa - instead of searching for simple explanations of the most famous mental processes, find complex ones.

For example, the meanings of the words “feelings”, “emotions” or “consciousness” seem so natural, clear, human, that it is not clear where to begin the argument. But this book says that each of these words describes the effects of processes in large networks within the brain. Chapter 4 shows that “consciousness” is related to more than 20 similar processes.

You would think that we are only making things worse and worse, instead of simplifying. But on a large scale, this increased complexity will ease our task. As soon as we divide the old puzzle into parts, we will replace the old, big problem with a few small ones - complex, but solvable. In addition, Chapter 9 states that treating oneself as a complex machine does not detract from self-esteem and heightens our sense of responsibility.

The division of these large tasks into smaller ones will begin with an image of an ordinary brain, containing so many parts, which we will call “resources” [1].



We will use this picture in explaining some thought process (Anger, Love, Shame), trying to show how each state of mind can be the result of the action of certain mental resources. For example, what we call “Anger” seems to bother resources that force us to respond with unusual speed and power, while at the same time stifling resources that cause us to plan and act prudently. Thus, Anger replaces caution with aggressiveness, and sympathy with hostility. Similarly, the Fear state uses resources for retreat.

Citizen: Sometimes everything seems funny and joyful to me. And another time (although nothing changes) everything around you seems gloomy and sad, and friends say that I am “depressed” or “depressed.” Where do I have such states of consciousness — or mood, feelings, character — what are their cause?

Some of the popular answers are “It's all about brain chemistry” or “This is the result of stress” or “This is because of a negative mindset . ” Nevertheless, these statements do not say anything about the actual work of these processes, whereas the idea of ​​choosing a set of resources may suggest more specific ways in which our thinking changes. Part 1 proposes to reflect on the following fact:

When a person you know is in love, it seems as if he has been replaced - his thinking, goals, and priorities change. As if someone had clicked a switch - and launched another program.

What can cause such changes in the brain? This book takes the following approach:

Each of the basic "emotional states" is the result of the inclusion of certain resources, while other resources are turned off - thus changing the way the brain works

But what activates resource sets? The following sections show that there should be resources in the brain responsible for “Criticism” - each of which recognizes a particular state and activates a specific set of other resources. Some congenital Critics - fear, anger, hunger and thirst, they helped our ancestors survive. Thus, Anger and Fear developed for protection, and Hunger and Thirst for nourishment.



As we grow up and learn, we develop the ability to activate other sets of resources, such states, which we consider more “intellectual” or “emotional”.

For example, as soon as you encounter a difficult task, your mind switches between different Images of Thinking - choosing different sets of resources helps to divide the task into smaller parts or find suitable analogies or find a solution in the memories - or even ask someone to help. In other words:

Each of the basic Thinking Patterns is the result of turning on or turning off certain resources — in this way the way the brain works changes.

The rest of the book claims that this switch may be something that is inherent in our mind — a unique creative potential. For example, in the first parts we will try to show how this explains such states of mind as Love, Affection, Grief and Depression, in terms of how they use our resources. The following chapters deal with more “intelligent” types of thinking.

Citizen: It is strange that you equally explain emotions and ordinary thinking. Thinking is mostly rational - dry, detached, logical - while emotions enliven our ways of thinking, adding irrational feelings and prejudices.

The traditional view of emotions is that they add color to ordinary simple thoughts, just as artists use colors to enhance the effect of black and white drawings. However, this book instead states that many of our emotional states cause some specific ways of thinking to begin to suppress our use of certain resources! For example, in Chapter 1, “hobby” will be depicted as a condition in which we suppress some resources that we could use to recognize errors in someone else. In addition, I think it is a myth that there is such a thing as purely logical rational thinking, because our thinking always depends on our assumptions, values ​​and goals.

Citizen: It still seems to me that you simplify everything a lot. For example, emotional states, such as fear and disgust, include both the body and the brain: we feel discomfort in the chest or abdomen, palpitations or weakness, we are thrilled or sweat.

I agree that this opinion may seem too extreme, but sometimes, in order to explore new ideas, we need to postpone our old ideas, at least temporarily. For example, it is widely believed that emotions are deeply connected with the state of the body. However, Chapter 7 describes the opposite point of view, regarding our parts of the body as resources that the brain can use to change (or maintain) its mental state! For example, you can sometimes force yourself to save a certain facial expression.

So, although this book is called The Machine of Emotions, it states that emotional states are not particularly different from the processes that we call “thinking”; emotions are a certain way of thinking that we use to increase our creative potential, and if passions do not deceive us, this diversity of ways of thinking should be such a significant part of what we call "intelligence", which, perhaps, we must call "ingenuity." And this concerns not only emotional states, but also our entire mental activity:

If you "understand" something in only one way, then you understand almost nothing, because you have nowhere to go if you have no solution. But if you present something in different ways, then if you are rather upset, you can switch between different points of view until you find one that works!

Accordingly, when we develop machines to imitate the mind, that is, to create artificial intelligence, we need to make sure that these machines are also equipped with a sufficient variety:

If the program works only in one way, then when this method crashes, the program stops working. But a program that has several ways to continue working may then switch to another approach or find a suitable replacement.

This idea is the central theme of this book, and it absolutely does not coincide with the popular opinion that every person has a central core - some invisible spirit or self from which all mental abilities emanate. For it seems like a humiliating idea - that all our virtues are secondary, or that we do not deserve recognition for our achievements, because they come to us as gifts from some other source. Instead, I see our dignity in what constitutes each of us: a tremendous collection of different ways of dealing with various situations and difficulties. This diversity distinguishes us from most other animals — and from all the machines we built in the past — and each chapter of this book will look at some of the sources of our unique human ingenuity.

• Part 1. We are born with many mental resources.
• Part 2. Learn to interact with others.
• Part 3. Emotions are different Images of Thinking.
• Part 4. Learn to think about recent thoughts.
• Part 5. Learn to think at different levels.
• Part 6. We accumulate tremendous experience.
• Part 7. Switching between different Images of Thinking.
• Part 8. Find different ways of representing things.
• Part 9. We build different models of ourselves.

For centuries, psychologists have been looking for ways to explain our daily thinking processes, but many thinkers still consider the nature of the mind to be secret. In fact, it is still widely believed that the mind consists of ingredients that can only exist in living beings, that no machine can feel or think, nor worry about what can happen to it, or have self-awareness, can not write a picture or compose a symphony.

This book pursues all these goals at once: it offers a description of the work of the brain and describes machines that can feel and think. Then we can try to apply these ideas both to understand ourselves and to develop artificial intelligence.

How to read quotes in the book

If the quote in quotes belongs to a real person, the date of publication and source are indicated.

Marcel Proust, 1927: “The reader reads first of all himself. And the writer's works are nothing more than an optical device, handed to them by the reader, allowing the latter to discern in himself that without this book he probably could not have made out. ”

If the quotation is without quotation marks, this is a fictional comment that the reader might have:

Citizen: If ordinary thinking is so difficult, why does it seem so simple

Most references are common bibliographic quotes, such as

Schenk 1975: Roger K. Schenk, conceptual information processing, Elsevier Science 1975. ISBN: 0444107738.

Some links refer to pages on the Internet.

Lenat 1998: Douglas B. Lenat, Context Space Sizes, www.cyc.com/doc/context-space.pdf

Some other links are related to online newsgroups, for example

McDermott 1992: Drew McDermott. In comp.ai.philosophy, February 7, 1992.

To access such newsgroups (along with the context in which they were written), you can search Google for “comp.ai.philosophy McDermott”. I will also try to keep copies of them on my website at www.emotionmachine.net and ask readers to send me questions and comments through this website.

[1] Note that the term “resource” is used in this book, whereas in the previous book, the Society of Mind, the term “agent” was used. I changed the terms because too many readers assumed that the “agent” is something like a person (for example, a travel agent) who can act independently, as if agents in the brain can work together just like people. In contrast, most resources specialize in [performing] certain types of work for some other resources and cannot directly interact with most other human resources. For more on how these two books relate, see Push Singh 2003, which helped develop many of the ideas in this book.

For the translation, thanks to urticazoku , who responded to my call in the "previous chapter." Who wants to help with the translation - write in a personal or mail magisterludi2016@yandex.ru

By the way, we launched the translation of another cool book - “The Dream Machine: The History of Computer Revolution” .