Marvin Minsky "The Emotion Machine": Chapter 3 "Learning from Failures"
The father of artificial intelligence is thinking about how to make a machine that would be proud of us . Marvin Minsky was a rather tough scientist and the fact that he explored the theme of feelings and emotions with his “scalpel of knowledge”, which makes us human, is quite interesting and useful. The book is an excellent example of how to use the “ITish approach” to try to comprehend the “human”: values, ideals, love, pain, common sense.
It would be great to never make mistakes and never have false notions. But perfection will always be unattainable: we constantly make mistakes and shortcomings.
')
Joan's knee pain began to worsen. Today she was hurt all day, even when she did not touch the sore spot. She thinks: “I shouldn't have turned when I lifted this box. And I finally have to put ice on my knee. ”
We like to think about the situation in a positive way: “An expert is a person who knows what he is doing.” And you know how to do most things well, that you hardly think about how to do them. You remember most of the things you see, and also you communicate without wondering how you do it. However, experience also has a negative side: “An expert is someone who rarely fails because he knows what to do.” Because of this, we usually do not face the wall. We rarely try to insert any things into our eyes. We never tell strangers how scary they are.
What part of human knowledge is based on the knowledge of what actions should not be taken in order to avoid all sorts of mistakes? We don’t know much about this “negative experience”, because this topic is rarely discussed in Psychology, with the exception of the writings of Sigmund Freud.
Perhaps this fact was not detected, due to the fact that we can not observe from the outside that people do not do to achieve any goal. Studying such things is as difficult as forcing your mind to think about what makes you stay away from absurd ideas. To take into account this unpleasant fact, we assume that there are special resources in our brain, let's call them Critics, each of which recognizes a certain kind of error. Below are several types of Critics; we consider them in more detail in chapter §7.
Corrector Corrector warns you when you start doing something dangerous. "You have to stop doing this action right now, because you are pulling your hand into an open fire." But such warnings may come too late.
A suppressor can warn you of the danger you face and can veto certain actions that you would like to take by stopping them before it is too late — for example, telling you: “No, do not go in that direction!” Or he can tell you to use some kind of debugging technique for some event.
The censor (or Corrector) works even earlier, and keeps you from having dangerous thoughts - so you can't even think about putting your finger in a fire. Censors can work so efficiently that you won’t even know that he is performing any action.
The self-controller recognizes that you could not perform an action, because, instead of performing this action as you previously intended, you "changed your mind" to do it.
Suppressors are much safer than Proofreaders, but both of them tend to make you act more prudently, at a time when you think about something abstract. However, the censors do not consume time at all on data processing, because they repel you from risky actions, without interrupting the performance of your other thoughts in such a way that they speed you up. That is why some experts can do things quickly: they simply do not think about the wrong things.
Student: How can a censor throw away a bad thought before you know what you are most likely to think about? Since there is no paradox here?
AI programmer: This is not a problem. Simply design each censor as a self-learning machine that will record which solutions lead to errors. Then, when he discovers a similar choice, he will direct your thought in a different direction, which, ultimately, will not lead you to make the same decision.
Student: In that case, wouldn't such a Censor consume a certain time of your brain? Also, what if both options had equally bad consequences? In this case, the Censor should work even earlier, so that you do not get into a bad situation because of the decision of the Censor itself.
Programmer AI: We can solve this problem by simply giving each Censor enough memory to memorize some of the previous steps that led to the development of a negative situation.
Student: Maybe this game is not worth the candle? If your Censors can save from any of your mistakes, this can make your behavior ultra conservative and you will not be able to generate new ideas.
In fact, some experts know so many things and ways that a device or action may not work, that it becomes extremely difficult for them to generate new ideas at all.
What happens when too many Critics turn on (or turn off)? Here is a brief description of what happens in this case:
In a later work, the author speaks more about such mental cascades:
It is easy for us to see the extremes in the behavior of people suffering from those mental illnesses that we call “bipolar” disorders; in chapter 7, it will be suggested that we all use similar processes in our everyday life. Thus, you can use the following procedure when faced with a new problem for you:
At the beginning, turn off most of your Critics. It will help you start thinking about things you previously couldn’t think about - without worrying about how well these things can work. Thus engage in a short period of "manic" state.
Then, you can turn on most critics in order to investigate your results with skepticism — so if you had a mild depression.
Finally, choose one approach that seems promising to you, and then start developing it until one of your Critics starts complaining that you have stopped making progress.
Sometimes you can move between these phrases consciously. One of my guesses is that we are constantly unconsciously moving between these three states so quickly that we can hardly notice that something is happening in our brain.
Many things to which we treat positively (for example, beauty, humor, and also pleasure itself) can be based on censorship — thus, they can be ultimately attributed to negative things. Thus, pleasure can be assigned to a “positive” process that is currently “under control” at the moment — regardless of the fact that other processes (which are currently being suppressed) may view a particular action as “negative”. (See §9-2 of SoM) Thus, the phrase “I get pleasure from it” means both “I want to stay in the current state” and “I want to prevent any changes to this state”.
Student: But it seemed to me that it is widely believed that learning works by “strengthening” the bonds that led to success, and “weakening those bonds that led to failure. Many teachers say that we should always be pleased to learn, because pleasure is our reward for success, while failure holds back our aspirations and demotivates us.
This popular view is based on research (which was mainly done on pigeons and rats), which showed that faster remuneration speeds up learning. This assured many teachers of the above idea that learning should be a pleasant experience. However, we should not thoughtlessly apply this idea to ourselves, since we can also learn to reflect on the actions taken!
I’m not saying that the “theory of amplification” is wrong - for people this theory can be part of a big puzzle; in §8-5, we will say that our ability to learn based on understanding failures may be more important than “reinforcing” training — in any case, this is the case with high-level thinking. For, when pleasure can help us learn simple things, it will be discussed in section 9-4 that we may need to suffer in order for large-scale reorganizations to happen in our brain. If this is the case in this way, the ancient Stoic would say: a reward for success may lead you to celebrate this event, rather than to research it. Here are some more reasons why “learning on the basis of success” may not always be justified, especially when this success was expected.
Reinforcement can lead to Rigidity: if the system is already working as it should, then an additional “positive stimulus” can make the connections between neurons much stronger than they should be, which can make it difficult for the system to adapt to new situations in the future.
Dependency can lead to side effects: if a particular resource P starts working so well that all other resources become dependent on it, then any change you make to resource P is more likely to damage these dependent resources. In other words, as the saying goes: "Do not fix this until it is broken."
Negative Expertise: one of the ways to avoid such side effects is to leave the decorated resource unchanged, but introduce additional Critique and Censor into the system to monitor conditions and avoid a situation where this resource would not work. In other words, start treating this resource as some exceptions in the rule.
Radical training: you can “tune” a certain skill by applying a large number of small steps in training, but soon no small changes will help you, for you will fall into the local maximum area. In this case, further changes may require some discomfort from you and acceptance of frustration in your skills. For more information, see §9-4.
The principle of Papert: when two or more methods used are in conflict, instead of seeking a compromise between them, it is more profitable to abandon them and try something else. Many of the steps that determine mental growth are based less on acquiring new skills, and more on learning to use old knowledge but in completely new ways.
Thus, for the reasons described above, we need to learn not only by using methods that worked in the past, but also by using methods that did not produce results, and also by thinking why these methods did not have success, which would avoid common mistakes.
Student: Yes, but why can't we learn to simply break the connection when you are making an annoying mistake so that your brain will never do this kind of action again?
One of the reasons why this is a very bad idea is that you lose the chance to find out what really went wrong, and you made a mistake (so that in the future you could avoid errors of this kind). The second problem is that using this tactic and changing something in the system, this action leads to a change in the behavior of other systems that have previously formed connections with certain resources, because these links will also be based on those connections. If you don’t know how your chosen system works, you can make it much worse if you “correct” existing errors.
Programmer: I absolutely understand what you mean. Each attempt to improve the program will lead to the appearance of new errors. That is why new programs often have huge chunks of old code: no one remembers how it works, and therefore everyone is afraid to change anything in it.
Student: But what if you simply have no alternative options, because something happened and you need to fix it.
Perhaps our most important step in improving ourselves is to learn to think about thinking itself, that is, to learn to “reflect on” what our brain thinks and how. However, for this you need to learn to enjoy the stress that we experience at the time when we study ourselves. For more details, see §8-5 and §9-4.
Creativity: Why do some people have better ideas than other people? I'm not talking about "new" ideas, because you can easily build a machine that would give out an endless stream of new things that no one has ever seen; what distinguishes thinkers from other people is “creativity,” which is not manifested in how many things a thinker can come up with, but how much these things are useful for the world around. This means that creative people must have some kind of mechanisms that must suppress, and maybe even force not generate, things that have too much novelty in themselves, focusing on things that are a little different from existing ones and that benefit. .
Humor: Humor is also usually perceived as a positive thing, but in reality, jokes mainly focus on negative things - in the sense that they are almost always with things or activities that a person should not do because they are forbidden, disgusting or implementation their life is extremely stupid.
Decisiveness: Similarly, we tend to think of making decisions as positive things. But in those moments when we make choices (and which we describe as “an act of free will”) our internal processes may function completely differently than we think. The moment you make a decision may be neither more nor less than turning off the complex processes that the brain uses to compare available alternatives.
Pleasure: if we consider the mind as an area of ​​various competing resources, then the more pleasure we get (in the sense of ourselves), the more we can harm all existing mental processes! For in this case, a particular process seizes complete control over your mind, shutting off all other processes. Such a seizure of control by any one process makes it difficult to focus on some other activity (every addict can describe such sensations). The effect of pleasure will be discussed in Chapter 9.
There are other ways to disable resources, except for direct attempts to suppress them. One way to suppress a resource is to activate one of the competitors of this resource. For example, you can “push away” the sleep time if you engage in a fight with someone.
Another option to suppress certain resources is to repeat a certain stimulus that activates a resource until a specific resource stops responding to it - this method is very similar to the fairy tale “About the Shepherd and the Wolf”.
Parenting: Now think about what a person should do in the process of raising a child. He must feed, wash, protect, clothe, teach and help him; over the years a person must sacrifice wealth and attention. What motivation can make a person give up many other pleasures and goals in order to become so selfless? Such strong restrictions, if imposed from the outside, seem to be cruel and highly sophisticated torture. It is obvious that natural selection favored those who developed ways to suppress the psychic Critics responsible for such behavior; no one who does not have the above critics will not be able to endure such prolonged stress, which ultimately will reduce the number of descendants.
Beauty: we tend to regard beauty as positive things. But when someone says that something is “beautiful,” and you ask, “What makes you feel this feeling for a given object?”, Your interlocutor may regard this question as an attack on his personality, or explain with the fact that everyone has his own taste, ”or he can answer you quite childishly:“ I just like this thing. ” Similar answers testify (as we saw in paragraph 1-1) that the sympathy of these people stems from the suppression of their internal Critics. We all know that if someone tries to find any flaw in the object - he will certainly find it.
Mystical Experience: Turning off internal Critics results in both reducing the number of problems surrounding you and reducing the number of goals you are pursuing. And if the internal Critics turn off too much, then your whole world around you can suddenly change - everything around you will seem magnificent. If you want to experience this given perception of the world view - there are well-known methods of self-control that will help you with this. These techniques help to remove various types of pain and stress, as well as a feeling of hunger and cold. Similar effects can be caused by various psychoactive drugs, and various methods of meditation. If you decide on such an experiment, do not forget to conduct it in a quiet place that can provide you with sensory deprivation, which will help to turn off most of the internal Critics. Then create a rhythmic rumble in which some monotonous phrase or tone is repeated, and after a while this sound will lose all meaning and essence - what will happen with almost all the other sensations! If you did everything right, you may suddenly find yourself overwhelmed by some extremely alluring sensation of Being - and then you can spend the rest of your life trying to regain that feeling again. I suspect that this sensation masks any references and traces of your earliest Impreimers that lurk in the depths of your mind.
People have entered many different words to describe the state of Being: “Ecstasy”, “Rapture”, “Euphoria”, “Bliss and mystical experience”. When you experience this sensation, it starts to show you that you have known the Great Truth, that nothing else but it matters, and that you no longer need any proof of its existence; your mind quenches all attempts to ask a question about what exactly has been revealed to you at the moment of knowing this sensation, and when you try to explain to your friends what you felt, you will find that you can hardly say anything else, except how much the sensation from This state was "magnificent." However, the state in which you did not find any negative feelings, due to the fact that you turned off all of your internal Critics, is best described as "impeccable."
For the translation, thanks to Stanislav Sukhanitsky
Marvin Lee Minsky (Eng. Marvin Lee Minsky; August 9, 1927 - January 24, 2016) - American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence, co-founder of the Laboratory of artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [ Wikipedia ]
Interesting Facts:
§3-5 Proofreaders, Suppressors and Censors
“Do not pay attention to critics. And don't even try to ignore them. ”
- Sam Goldwyn.
It would be great to never make mistakes and never have false notions. But perfection will always be unattainable: we constantly make mistakes and shortcomings.
')
Joan's knee pain began to worsen. Today she was hurt all day, even when she did not touch the sore spot. She thinks: “I shouldn't have turned when I lifted this box. And I finally have to put ice on my knee. ”
We like to think about the situation in a positive way: “An expert is a person who knows what he is doing.” And you know how to do most things well, that you hardly think about how to do them. You remember most of the things you see, and also you communicate without wondering how you do it. However, experience also has a negative side: “An expert is someone who rarely fails because he knows what to do.” Because of this, we usually do not face the wall. We rarely try to insert any things into our eyes. We never tell strangers how scary they are.
What part of human knowledge is based on the knowledge of what actions should not be taken in order to avoid all sorts of mistakes? We don’t know much about this “negative experience”, because this topic is rarely discussed in Psychology, with the exception of the writings of Sigmund Freud.
Perhaps this fact was not detected, due to the fact that we can not observe from the outside that people do not do to achieve any goal. Studying such things is as difficult as forcing your mind to think about what makes you stay away from absurd ideas. To take into account this unpleasant fact, we assume that there are special resources in our brain, let's call them Critics, each of which recognizes a certain kind of error. Below are several types of Critics; we consider them in more detail in chapter §7.
Corrector Corrector warns you when you start doing something dangerous. "You have to stop doing this action right now, because you are pulling your hand into an open fire." But such warnings may come too late.
A suppressor can warn you of the danger you face and can veto certain actions that you would like to take by stopping them before it is too late — for example, telling you: “No, do not go in that direction!” Or he can tell you to use some kind of debugging technique for some event.
The censor (or Corrector) works even earlier, and keeps you from having dangerous thoughts - so you can't even think about putting your finger in a fire. Censors can work so efficiently that you won’t even know that he is performing any action.
The self-controller recognizes that you could not perform an action, because, instead of performing this action as you previously intended, you "changed your mind" to do it.
Suppressors are much safer than Proofreaders, but both of them tend to make you act more prudently, at a time when you think about something abstract. However, the censors do not consume time at all on data processing, because they repel you from risky actions, without interrupting the performance of your other thoughts in such a way that they speed you up. That is why some experts can do things quickly: they simply do not think about the wrong things.
Student: How can a censor throw away a bad thought before you know what you are most likely to think about? Since there is no paradox here?
AI programmer: This is not a problem. Simply design each censor as a self-learning machine that will record which solutions lead to errors. Then, when he discovers a similar choice, he will direct your thought in a different direction, which, ultimately, will not lead you to make the same decision.
Student: In that case, wouldn't such a Censor consume a certain time of your brain? Also, what if both options had equally bad consequences? In this case, the Censor should work even earlier, so that you do not get into a bad situation because of the decision of the Censor itself.
Programmer AI: We can solve this problem by simply giving each Censor enough memory to memorize some of the previous steps that led to the development of a negative situation.
Student: Maybe this game is not worth the candle? If your Censors can save from any of your mistakes, this can make your behavior ultra conservative and you will not be able to generate new ideas.
In fact, some experts know so many things and ways that a device or action may not work, that it becomes extremely difficult for them to generate new ideas at all.
Excessive switching
Lately - and why, I myself do not know - I have lost all my gaiety, abandoned all the usual activities; and, indeed, in my soul it is so hard that this beautiful temple, the land, seems to me to be a deserted cape; this incomparable canopy, the air, you see, this magnificently spreading firmament, this magnificent roof, lined with golden fire — all this seems to me to be nothing but a hazy and plaguey accumulation of vapors.
- Hamlet
What happens when too many Critics turn on (or turn off)? Here is a brief description of what happens in this case:
Kay Redfield Jamieson: “The clinical picture of the manic-depressive syndrome is much more lethal and infinitely more complex than the bipolar disorder that is now assumed by the psychological nomenclature. The cycles of mood and internal energy fluctuations serve as an indicator of the constant change of thoughts, behavior and feelings. The disease covers the extreme points of human experience. Thinking can be something ornate, psychosis, or “madness,” a system of incredibly clear, fast, and creative associations, or such a severe degradation that in such a state it is impossible to discern any mental activity. Behavior can be rabid, expansive, bizarre or seductive, or it can be paranoid, lethargic, and dangerously suicidal. Mood can fluctuate between euphoria and despair or irritability and despair. ... But such highs associated with mania are usually pleasant and productive during the early, easier stages. ”
In a later work, the author speaks more about such mental cascades:
“It seems that both the quality and the number of thoughts are formed during giopmanii. Their number can vary from a very small acceleration, to a complete psychotic inconsistency. It is unclear what causes this qualitative change in mental work. However, such a change in cognitive states can contribute to the formation of unique ideas and associations. ... A depressed person tends to ask stingy and ornate questions, while a person suffering from mania tends to respond with unbridled energy and confidence. Constant transitions from a highly constrained way of thinking to an incredibly expansive way of thinking, from a depressed to a hot-tempered state, from a gloomy to an incredibly lively mood, from open to closed poses, from cold to scorchingly warm attitude to others, as well as the speed and fluidity of movements that occur during the time of such a change of states can be extremely painful and confusing. ”
It is easy for us to see the extremes in the behavior of people suffering from those mental illnesses that we call “bipolar” disorders; in chapter 7, it will be suggested that we all use similar processes in our everyday life. Thus, you can use the following procedure when faced with a new problem for you:
At the beginning, turn off most of your Critics. It will help you start thinking about things you previously couldn’t think about - without worrying about how well these things can work. Thus engage in a short period of "manic" state.
Then, you can turn on most critics in order to investigate your results with skepticism — so if you had a mild depression.
Finally, choose one approach that seems promising to you, and then start developing it until one of your Critics starts complaining that you have stopped making progress.
Sometimes you can move between these phrases consciously. One of my guesses is that we are constantly unconsciously moving between these three states so quickly that we can hardly notice that something is happening in our brain.
Studying at Failures
"Never interrupt an opponent when he makes a mistake."
- Napoleon Bonaparte
Many things to which we treat positively (for example, beauty, humor, and also pleasure itself) can be based on censorship — thus, they can be ultimately attributed to negative things. Thus, pleasure can be assigned to a “positive” process that is currently “under control” at the moment — regardless of the fact that other processes (which are currently being suppressed) may view a particular action as “negative”. (See §9-2 of SoM) Thus, the phrase “I get pleasure from it” means both “I want to stay in the current state” and “I want to prevent any changes to this state”.
Student: But it seemed to me that it is widely believed that learning works by “strengthening” the bonds that led to success, and “weakening those bonds that led to failure. Many teachers say that we should always be pleased to learn, because pleasure is our reward for success, while failure holds back our aspirations and demotivates us.
This popular view is based on research (which was mainly done on pigeons and rats), which showed that faster remuneration speeds up learning. This assured many teachers of the above idea that learning should be a pleasant experience. However, we should not thoughtlessly apply this idea to ourselves, since we can also learn to reflect on the actions taken!
I’m not saying that the “theory of amplification” is wrong - for people this theory can be part of a big puzzle; in §8-5, we will say that our ability to learn based on understanding failures may be more important than “reinforcing” training — in any case, this is the case with high-level thinking. For, when pleasure can help us learn simple things, it will be discussed in section 9-4 that we may need to suffer in order for large-scale reorganizations to happen in our brain. If this is the case in this way, the ancient Stoic would say: a reward for success may lead you to celebrate this event, rather than to research it. Here are some more reasons why “learning on the basis of success” may not always be justified, especially when this success was expected.
Reinforcement can lead to Rigidity: if the system is already working as it should, then an additional “positive stimulus” can make the connections between neurons much stronger than they should be, which can make it difficult for the system to adapt to new situations in the future.
Dependency can lead to side effects: if a particular resource P starts working so well that all other resources become dependent on it, then any change you make to resource P is more likely to damage these dependent resources. In other words, as the saying goes: "Do not fix this until it is broken."
Negative Expertise: one of the ways to avoid such side effects is to leave the decorated resource unchanged, but introduce additional Critique and Censor into the system to monitor conditions and avoid a situation where this resource would not work. In other words, start treating this resource as some exceptions in the rule.
Radical training: you can “tune” a certain skill by applying a large number of small steps in training, but soon no small changes will help you, for you will fall into the local maximum area. In this case, further changes may require some discomfort from you and acceptance of frustration in your skills. For more information, see §9-4.
The principle of Papert: when two or more methods used are in conflict, instead of seeking a compromise between them, it is more profitable to abandon them and try something else. Many of the steps that determine mental growth are based less on acquiring new skills, and more on learning to use old knowledge but in completely new ways.
Thus, for the reasons described above, we need to learn not only by using methods that worked in the past, but also by using methods that did not produce results, and also by thinking why these methods did not have success, which would avoid common mistakes.
Student: Yes, but why can't we learn to simply break the connection when you are making an annoying mistake so that your brain will never do this kind of action again?
One of the reasons why this is a very bad idea is that you lose the chance to find out what really went wrong, and you made a mistake (so that in the future you could avoid errors of this kind). The second problem is that using this tactic and changing something in the system, this action leads to a change in the behavior of other systems that have previously formed connections with certain resources, because these links will also be based on those connections. If you don’t know how your chosen system works, you can make it much worse if you “correct” existing errors.
Programmer: I absolutely understand what you mean. Each attempt to improve the program will lead to the appearance of new errors. That is why new programs often have huge chunks of old code: no one remembers how it works, and therefore everyone is afraid to change anything in it.
Student: But what if you simply have no alternative options, because something happened and you need to fix it.
Perhaps our most important step in improving ourselves is to learn to think about thinking itself, that is, to learn to “reflect on” what our brain thinks and how. However, for this you need to learn to enjoy the stress that we experience at the time when we study ourselves. For more details, see §8-5 and §9-4.
Variations of the Negative Experience
Creativity: Why do some people have better ideas than other people? I'm not talking about "new" ideas, because you can easily build a machine that would give out an endless stream of new things that no one has ever seen; what distinguishes thinkers from other people is “creativity,” which is not manifested in how many things a thinker can come up with, but how much these things are useful for the world around. This means that creative people must have some kind of mechanisms that must suppress, and maybe even force not generate, things that have too much novelty in themselves, focusing on things that are a little different from existing ones and that benefit. .
Humor: Humor is also usually perceived as a positive thing, but in reality, jokes mainly focus on negative things - in the sense that they are almost always with things or activities that a person should not do because they are forbidden, disgusting or implementation their life is extremely stupid.
Decisiveness: Similarly, we tend to think of making decisions as positive things. But in those moments when we make choices (and which we describe as “an act of free will”) our internal processes may function completely differently than we think. The moment you make a decision may be neither more nor less than turning off the complex processes that the brain uses to compare available alternatives.
Pleasure: if we consider the mind as an area of ​​various competing resources, then the more pleasure we get (in the sense of ourselves), the more we can harm all existing mental processes! For in this case, a particular process seizes complete control over your mind, shutting off all other processes. Such a seizure of control by any one process makes it difficult to focus on some other activity (every addict can describe such sensations). The effect of pleasure will be discussed in Chapter 9.
There are other ways to disable resources, except for direct attempts to suppress them. One way to suppress a resource is to activate one of the competitors of this resource. For example, you can “push away” the sleep time if you engage in a fight with someone.
Another option to suppress certain resources is to repeat a certain stimulus that activates a resource until a specific resource stops responding to it - this method is very similar to the fairy tale “About the Shepherd and the Wolf”.
Parenting: Now think about what a person should do in the process of raising a child. He must feed, wash, protect, clothe, teach and help him; over the years a person must sacrifice wealth and attention. What motivation can make a person give up many other pleasures and goals in order to become so selfless? Such strong restrictions, if imposed from the outside, seem to be cruel and highly sophisticated torture. It is obvious that natural selection favored those who developed ways to suppress the psychic Critics responsible for such behavior; no one who does not have the above critics will not be able to endure such prolonged stress, which ultimately will reduce the number of descendants.
Beauty: we tend to regard beauty as positive things. But when someone says that something is “beautiful,” and you ask, “What makes you feel this feeling for a given object?”, Your interlocutor may regard this question as an attack on his personality, or explain with the fact that everyone has his own taste, ”or he can answer you quite childishly:“ I just like this thing. ” Similar answers testify (as we saw in paragraph 1-1) that the sympathy of these people stems from the suppression of their internal Critics. We all know that if someone tries to find any flaw in the object - he will certainly find it.
Mystical Experience: Turning off internal Critics results in both reducing the number of problems surrounding you and reducing the number of goals you are pursuing. And if the internal Critics turn off too much, then your whole world around you can suddenly change - everything around you will seem magnificent. If you want to experience this given perception of the world view - there are well-known methods of self-control that will help you with this. These techniques help to remove various types of pain and stress, as well as a feeling of hunger and cold. Similar effects can be caused by various psychoactive drugs, and various methods of meditation. If you decide on such an experiment, do not forget to conduct it in a quiet place that can provide you with sensory deprivation, which will help to turn off most of the internal Critics. Then create a rhythmic rumble in which some monotonous phrase or tone is repeated, and after a while this sound will lose all meaning and essence - what will happen with almost all the other sensations! If you did everything right, you may suddenly find yourself overwhelmed by some extremely alluring sensation of Being - and then you can spend the rest of your life trying to regain that feeling again. I suspect that this sensation masks any references and traces of your earliest Impreimers that lurk in the depths of your mind.
People have entered many different words to describe the state of Being: “Ecstasy”, “Rapture”, “Euphoria”, “Bliss and mystical experience”. When you experience this sensation, it starts to show you that you have known the Great Truth, that nothing else but it matters, and that you no longer need any proof of its existence; your mind quenches all attempts to ask a question about what exactly has been revealed to you at the moment of knowing this sensation, and when you try to explain to your friends what you felt, you will find that you can hardly say anything else, except how much the sensation from This state was "magnificent." However, the state in which you did not find any negative feelings, due to the fact that you turned off all of your internal Critics, is best described as "impeccable."
For the translation, thanks to Stanislav Sukhanitsky
Table of Contents of The Emotion Machine
Introduction
Chapter 4. CONSCIOUSNESS
Chapter 5. LEVELS OF MENTAL ACTIVITIES
Chapter 6. COMMON SENSE
Chapter 7. Thinking.
Chapter 8. Resourcefulness.
Chapter 9. The Self.
Chapter 1. Falling in Love
Chapter 2. ATTACHMENTS AND GOALS
Chapter 3. FROM PAIN TO SUFFERINGChapter 4. CONSCIOUSNESS
Chapter 5. LEVELS OF MENTAL ACTIVITIES
Chapter 6. COMMON SENSE
Chapter 7. Thinking.
Chapter 8. Resourcefulness.
Chapter 9. The Self.
about the author
Marvin Lee Minsky (Eng. Marvin Lee Minsky; August 9, 1927 - January 24, 2016) - American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence, co-founder of the Laboratory of artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [ Wikipedia ]
Interesting Facts:
- Minsky was a friend of critic Harold Bloom from Yale University (Yale University), who spoke of him as “sinister Marvin Minsky”.
- Isaac Asimov described Minsky as one of two people who are smarter than himself; the second, in his opinion, was Karl Sagan.
- Marvin is a robot with artificial intelligence from the cycle of Douglas Adams novels Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (film).
- Minsky has a contract to freeze his brain after death in order to be “resurrected” in the future.
- In honor of Minsk named the dog of the protagonist in the movie Tron: Legacy. [ Wikipedia ]
About #philtech
#philtech (technology + philanthropy) is an open, publicly described technology that aligns the standard of living of as many people as possible by creating transparent platforms for interaction and access to data and knowledge. And satisfying the principles of filteha:
1. Opened and replicable, not competitive proprietary.
2. Built on the principles of self-organization and horizontal interaction.
3. Sustainable and prospective-oriented, and not pursuing local benefits.
4. Built on [open] data, not traditions and beliefs.
5. Non-violent and non-manipulative.
6. Inclusive, and not working for one group of people at the expense of others.
Philtech's social technology startups accelerator is a program of intensive development of early-stage projects aimed at leveling access to information, resources and opportunities. The second stream: March – June 2018.
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A community of people developing filtech projects or simply interested in the topic of technologies for the social sector.
#philtech news
Telegram channel with news about projects in the #philtech ideology and links to useful materials.
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#philtech (technology + philanthropy) is an open, publicly described technology that aligns the standard of living of as many people as possible by creating transparent platforms for interaction and access to data and knowledge. And satisfying the principles of filteha:
1. Opened and replicable, not competitive proprietary.
2. Built on the principles of self-organization and horizontal interaction.
3. Sustainable and prospective-oriented, and not pursuing local benefits.
4. Built on [open] data, not traditions and beliefs.
5. Non-violent and non-manipulative.
6. Inclusive, and not working for one group of people at the expense of others.
Philtech's social technology startups accelerator is a program of intensive development of early-stage projects aimed at leveling access to information, resources and opportunities. The second stream: March – June 2018.
Chat in Telegram
A community of people developing filtech projects or simply interested in the topic of technologies for the social sector.
#philtech news
Telegram channel with news about projects in the #philtech ideology and links to useful materials.
Subscribe to the weekly newsletter
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/358384/
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