Marvin Minsky "The Emotion Machine": Chapter 3 "Freud, Mood Control and Character"

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.

§3-6 Freudian Sandwich

Luck is a chance, but the problem is
That I came across her when I was wise,
And he studied at the failures, not the victories
- A. E. Houseman

Only a small number of psychology textbooks mention how we choose what we should think about, or how we choose what we should not think about. Anyway, this question was extremely important for Sigmund Freud, who presented the mind as a system in which every thought must overcome certain barriers before it manifests itself in consciousness. The following is his vision of mind:

“... a huge room in which various mental excitations are gathered, closely related to each other, representing individual beings. Another room is connected with this room, a kind of reception room, which is the abode of consciousness. On the threshold of the transition between these two rooms is the gatekeeper, who checks various mental arousal, carefully examines them, and does not let them into the reception room if they do not pass the selection criteria. You will not notice the difference between when the gatekeeper does not immediately pass various thoughts to the consciousness or when the thought penetrates the room to consciousness, but the gatekeeper returns it immediately. It all depends on the degree of his vigilance and the speed of work in recognizing those who have not passed the test. ”

Thus, it is not enough to go past the gatekeeper to reach consciousness. When thoughts pass through it, they first enter the receiving room, which can be called the “preconsciousness”.

“Excitations in the unconscious, as in the preconscious, are not detected by consciousness, because it is in a completely different room, so everything that does not get into the room to consciousness remains unconscious. When thoughts move closer to the threshold of the room of consciousness, but the gatekeeper does not let them in, they become “impossible to realize” and we call these thoughts repressed thoughts. But even if the arousal passes through the gatekeeper, they may not necessarily become conscious. They can become conscious thoughts if only consciousness can notice them. ”

Freud imagined the mind as an obstacle course in which only those thoughts that pass through all these obstacles can be brought to the attention of consciousness. When one of the tests, which Freud called “denial”, was passed, the idea was consciously condemned, thus becoming useless, it helps to remember whether this idea was rejected earlier or not. In another test, called “suppression,” the impulses of an idea are blocked at the earliest stages, without any awareness of this process by the thinker. However, repressed thoughts can still be manifested due to various types of disguises.

In the three-dimensional model of Freud's consciousness, many resources work at the same time, but they do not always have the same goals. Instead, the mind, according to Freud, is a battlefield between animal instincts and social constraints. These two forces are often incompatible with each other and the rest of the mind must constantly struggle to find a compromise between these two forces, which he does, mainly due to various tricks. One way to deal with the constraints imposed is to suppress the resource that is responsible for this constraint. Another way to circumvent the restrictions is to disguise or present the suppressed action so that none of the internal Critics or Censors will respond to it. Freud used the word "sublimation" to describe this phenomenon, but we sometimes call this phenomenon "rationalization".
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Only a few modern “cognitive psychologists” support Freud’s architectural solutions. He was one of the first to realize that the problems we face every day are much more difficult to resolve than was previously assumed, when this activity was allotted to only one leading process. Instead, Freud saw the human mind as a product of various activities, most of which are involved in the resolution of problem situations and the inconsistencies of our vision of the world with its actual representation.

§3-7. Control of our moods and character traits

“Love, as he believed, turns into a fool of man, but his current emotion was not stupidity, but wisdom; voice of wisdom, serenity, accuracy. ... It seemed to him such a perfect product of nature and circumstances that thinking about the future use of his invention caused breath-taking fear. As if it could reduce or destroy her beautiful personal harmony ... "
- Henry James in "The American" (The American)

In § 1-2 we described some ways that can change a person’s mental state:
“Sometimes a person finds himself in a state in which everything seems cheerful and bright, although nothing has changed from the outside. At another time, nothing can please you: the world around us seems gloomy and dark, and your friends say that you have become depressed. "
If you could turn off all your internal Critics, then it would seem that nothing has any flaws around. You would have only a few worries, worries and goals, and the people around you could describe your state as “euphoric,” “crazy,” or “manic.”

However, if you include too many Critics, you will see flaws in every detail of the world around you. The whole world will seem filled with flaws, overwhelmed by deluge of deluge. You will look for flaws and mistakes for your own purposes, and in that case you will have no desire to correct the current situation and will not respond to any praise.

This means that our internal Critics should be controlled6 if you turn them on too much you will never do anything. But if you turn off all the Critics, then it will seem to you that all your goals have been achieved and again you will not be able to achieve great results.

However, in everyday life there is a wide range in which the numbers of Critics switched on and off can vary. Sometimes you feel like adventurers, prone to feeling new experiences. In other cases, you feel conservative, trying to avoid any uncertainty. And when you are in an emergency (for example, when you face a danger), you have no time to reason what you can do, so you need to make quick decisions, not taking into account most factors. In a situation like this, you need to postpone long-term plans, suspend some resources that are related to your friends, put yourself under stress and pain, and do other things that you may regret later. To go into this state, you will have to suppress your internal suppressors, and in this case you will seem to be a completely different person around you.

We use terms such as “character traits” and “mood” to describe a person’s general condition. But such terms are quite difficult to define, because a very large number of processes are involved in the formation of a specific human condition. Some of these conditions affect our perception of reality, while others affect the goals we pursue, the strategies we choose, and the details we focus on. Other processes are involved in the functioning of transitions between the use of various abstract models, for example, we can first think about the physical things of the world, then start thinking about some social issues, and then start thinking about some long-term plans.

What determines these intervals that our mind spends in each of the above described states? These time intervals can cover huge ranges of values. An outburst of anger or fear, or an understanding of the presence of sexual connotations, can last for a very short time. Other moods can last minutes or hours, and some states persist for weeks and years. “John is angry” means that John is angry now, but the phrase “evil person” can describe a lifelong trait. The duration of these mental states may depend on how we regulate the mechanisms responsible for these state switches.

In § 7-2 we will reflect on how our Critics can be organized. To what extent are they independent - like those demons who constantly inspect the sites of any actions, waiting for the moment to intervene? To what extent are they controlled by special, more centralized mechanisms? How can we introduce new censors and critics? Can critics criticize themselves for performing certain actions? Is more organized mind a product of a better internal organization of critics?

More than a century has passed since Sigmund Freud raised such questions, however, they were so strongly ignored that we still cannot adequately answer them. Perhaps this situation will change when we can see what is happening inside the functioning brain.

For the translation, thanks to Stanislav Sukhanitsky

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 ]

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