Marvin Minsky "The Emotion Machine": Chapter 4 "Consciousness"

During the HYIP on the digital economy and ***, it's time to pay attention to how to bring “human” into technology and how technology helps to understand and improve and scale “human”. This will be helped by the stern Marvin Minsky, who analyzes with his merciless mind feelings, emotions, pain, love and consciousness.

§ 4-1. What is the nature of Consciousness?

“Not a single philosopher and, hardly, any of the writers have ever been able to explain the riddle of what human consciousness consists of. Body, external objects, memory, warm fantasies, other people's minds, guilt, fear, doubts, lies, fun, grief, breath-stopping pain and thousands of other things that words can only clumsily delineate, exist and are fused together in one connection of consciousness. ”
- Iris Murdoch "The Black Prince", 1973

What creatures are owners of consciousness? Does it have a chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan or baboon? And what about dolphins and elephants? Are frogs, fish, insects, or vegetables aware of themselves to a certain degree, or is the consciousness a distinct trait that separates us from other creatures?
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Although, these animals will not answer the question "Do you realize that you exist" or "What is your guess what is consciousness", the answers from people are hardly more useful. When you ask mystical thinkers how consciousness works, their answer does not really reveal the essence.

Sri Chinmoy: “Consciousness is an inner spark or an inner connection in us. The golden bond that connects our highest and most enlightened parts to our lowest and least illuminated parts. ” [one]

Some philosophers even insist that there is no sane answer to this question.

Jerry Fodor: “No one has any idea how something material can be conscious. Moreover, no one has the slightest idea how it can be for someone who has at least some idea how something tangible can be conscious. An overwhelming task for the philosophy of consciousness. ” [2]

Does consciousness work about the principle of “all or nothing” and has a clear boundary, or can it have different volume and properties, just as objects can change their characteristics and be either cold or hot?

Relativist: Everything has a little consciousness. The atom has a bit of it. More things should have more consciousness, and so on to the stars and galaxies.

Absolutist: We do not know where consciousness begins and ends, but it is absolutely clear that each thing consciousness either has or does not. From this it is clear that there is no consciousness in the stone.

Programmer: It seems to me that some computer programs already possess the rudiments of consciousness.

Logicist (1): Before understanding that such a consciousness must first be defined. Good arguments are found when they start with an exact statement of what exactly they are. Otherwise, you build a house in the sand.

Such a setting may sound “logical”, but this is all wrong when it comes to psychology, because it takes on faith that “consciousness” has a clear and precise meaning. Naturally, we do not want to be inaccurate, but a strict definition can further complicate the situation, until we make sure that our ideas are correct. The term "consciousness" we use for a variety of different processes and for different types of intentions; we apply it in relation to feelings, emotions and thoughts - and how we interpret them and how we feel about it. The same thing happens with most everyday words about the mind, such as "creativity" or "mind."

So, instead of asking what “consciousness” is or what we mean by the word “to realize”, we will try to look at when and why people use these mysterious words. But precisely why such a question arose at all? What is the essence of the mystery?

Daniel Dennett: “The phenomenon is called mysterious, because people do not know how to understand it yet. The human mind is almost the only remaining mystery. There were other great mysteries - the origin of the universe, time, space and gravity. ... However, Consciousness today stands out in this series of issues, as it confuses and deprives even the most sophisticated thinkers of speechlessness. Just as with all previous riddles, there are many who insist and hope that the riddle of consciousness will never be solved. ”
- Explanation of Consciousness, 1991

Indeed, many of those who “insist and hope” that consciousness cannot be explained, at the same time declare that it is itself the source of most of the virtues of the human mind.

Thinker 1: Consciousness is that which unites our present, past and future, and gives meaning to all of our experience.

Thinker 2: Consciousness gives us the opportunity to "realize" ourselves and get a sense of identity; it is what revives our minds and gives us the feeling that we are alive.

Thinker 3: Consciousness is what gives meaning to things for us; without this, we would not even understand that we have feelings.

Wow! How is it possible that a single principle, energy or force gives us so many abilities? And it can not! And just in this chapter it will be shown that there is no reason to believe that all these different abilities come from one single source. Indeed, from what we know about the brain, it is safer to assume that they are all based on different mechanisms.

William Calvin and George Augeman: “Current discussions about consciousness ... usually include such a side of mental life as concentration of attention, things that you don’t know what you know, mental repetition, thinking, decision making, awareness, altered state of consciousness, voluntary actions, subconscious priming (2) the development in children of self-awareness and narration that we tell ourselves when we are awake or asleep. ” [3]

All this shows that “consciousness” does not refer to one single idea or thing, but to the fact that we use this term as a compound word for many different processes.

§ 4-2. Opening the "suitcase" of Consciousness

Aaron Sloman: “You shouldn't ask how to define consciousness, how to explain it, how it developed, what its function is, etc. because there is no single thing for which all the answers will be the same. On the contrary, we have many sub-abilities for which the answers are different: for example, different types of perception, training, knowledge, attention control, self-monitoring, self-control, etc. ”[4]

To see the diversity of what the human brain does, think about this piece of daily thinking.

Joan partially crossed the street on her way to submit her report. While she is thinking about what to say at the meeting, she hears a sound, turns her head and sees a fast approaching car. Doubting to go or return, but feeling anxious about being late, she decides to run across the road. Later, she recalls her injured knee and reflects on her impulsive decision. “If my knee failed me, I would die. What would my friends think about me then? ”

It may seem natural to ask: "To what degree was Joan conscious about what she did?" But, instead of dwelling on the word "consciousness", let's look at a few things that Joan "did."

Reaction: Joan quickly responded to the sound.
Identification: She recognized it as sound.
Characterization: She classified it as a car sound.
Warning: She noted some things and ignored others.
Imagination: She imagined two or more possible scenarios for the future.
Uncertainty: She wondered whether to cross the street or walk away.
Decision making: She chose one of several alternative actions.
Memory: She restored the description of previous events.
Revaluation: In the future, she revised her choice.
Choice: She chose the preferred path among the possibilities.
Dark foreboding: She was anxious to be late.
Planning: She built a multi-step action plan.
Association: She tried to describe the state of her body.
Emotions: She changed most of her mental state.
Presentation: She interlinked many descriptions.
Language: She built several verbal expressions.
Narration: She heard them as a dialogue in her mind.
Anticipation: She was expecting a certain state of the future.
Intention: She changed some of her target priorities.
Reflection: She made various conclusions.
Reflection: She thought over what she had done recently.
Empathy: She presented the thoughts of other people.
Moral Reflection: She appreciated what she did.
Self Image: She created and used models of herself.
Self-awareness: She characterized her mental states.
Identity Sense: She saw herself as a creature.

This is just the beginning of a much longer list of sides of how we feel and think - and if we want to understand how our brain works, we will need to explain them all. In order to do this, we must take each one individually and consider in detail how each of them works. Then everyone who reads can decide which of them is worth, and which is not, viewed as a side of the “conscious”.

4-2.1. Compound words in Psychology

Holist [4]: Even after you analyze all those parts, you will still need to explain how they are all combined to create the streams of consciousness that arise from them. Therefore, you will still need some words to describe this whole phenomenon.

Why did our language come to include such terms as “awareness”, “perception”, “consciousness” each of which condenses many different processes?

Psychologist: Such collective words are useful in everyday social life because they help us communicate with both our friends and ourselves. And all because we all have some intricate ideas and we can put them in an indefinite compound term that gives visible relief in understanding.

Etik: We need to instill in them a commitment to responsibility and discipline. Our legislative and ethical principles are mainly based on the idea that we should punish or encourage only “deliberate” actions, that is, actions that are based on preliminary planning with prediction of consequences.

Psychiatrist: Perhaps we use these collective terms to keep ourselves asking too many questions about how our mind controls itself and what lies at the basis of our decisions.

Student: If “consciousness” is simply an integral term, then why is it happening that for us it is crystal clear that we possess such a thing? And if such a thing is constantly changing its value, then why is it not becoming obvious when we think about it?

This may be because no part of the brain can “see” much of what the rest of the brain does. The standard resource (5) inside the brain does the work inside itself so that other resources cannot perceive it. Moreover, when a resource tries to probe another resource, this action itself can change the state of this other one - and thus confuse exactly the data that would be necessary to find out what is happening.

David Hume: “The movement of our body follows the commands of our will. Every moment of this we are aware. But the means by which this is achieved; the energy with which the will performs such extraordinary operations; we are so far from the immediate realization of this that it must infinitely elude our most careful study. ”

Hume suggests that we can never develop more powerful ways to research ourselves - but today we have new scanners that show a lot of what is happening inside the brain. For example, we can mark the activity that begins before our limbs set in motion.

Dual philosopher: And yet, our tools will eventually fail, because you can measure the brain, but not the idea. Some creatures have consciousness, others do not - and consciousness is a subjective thing that cannot be explained in terms of physics.

Functional philosopher: What evidence can support your belief that consciousness cannot be explained? We can look at it simply as the name of what happens when certain processes are launched inside our brain.

I agree with this second opinion, except for the moment that we also have to say what these “specific processes” do - and why we distinguish them as a group. (The next section will propose a theory of this). However, many thinkers still believe that the structure of the brain must be based on something that exceeds the reachability of our current machines.

Emergentist [6]: Apparently, consciousness is one of those “whole things” that arise when the system becomes quite complex. Perhaps this is exactly what we should expect from a network of billions of cells in the brain.

If we increase the size of the system, it usually becomes worse to work until we improve its design, and this always implies some compromise; if the system is built with too many connections, then this will lead to a deadlock — at the same time, if there are too few connections, this is probably a useless system.

In addition, if complexity is the only thing we need, then almost everything would be conscious. We do not want to conclude that the waves of water think, but the way the wave breaks on the shore is more complex (at least in some way) than the processes that take place in our brain.

So, it makes no sense to ask what consciousness is because it is a compound word that we fill in with much more things than one simple common sense can have. It is also useless to try to discuss so many different things at the same time, except when we are trying to explain why we are trying to treat all these things as a single whole. Let's listen to Aaron Broken again:

Aaron Sloman: “Personally, I think that the definition of consciousness is an unnecessary task that distracts attention from important and complex problems. The whole idea is based on the fundamentally false notion that if there is a noun "consciousness", it means that there is a "thing", and it is the same as magnetism or electricity or pressure or temperature and that the correlative concept of this thing should be sought. Or another delusion that it is worth trying to prove that a particular mechanism may or may not create “this”, or try to figure out how “this” developed, or try to find out which animals have “this”, or try to decide at what point “this "Starts when the germ develops, or at what point does" it "end when brain death occurs, etc. There is not only one thing to relate, but a very large set of very different things. ”

I completely agree with the view Broken on this. In order to understand how our thinking works, we must study those “very different things” and then ask what kind of mechanisms some or all of them can perform. In other words, we must try to create - as opposed to define - mechanisms that our mind can do.

[1] Logicism - a direction in mathematics seeking to reduce all mathematics to logic (approx. Translator)

[2] Priming is a short-term effect that leaves a deep imprint on the psyche. For example, the first thing that the hatched ducklings will see is imprinted in their memory so that they will treat it like a mother (approx. Translator)

[3] Aaron Sloman is an English modern philosopher, one of not many who Marvin Minsky truly respected.

[4] Holism is a position in philosophy and science on the problem of the relationship between part and whole, emanating from the qualitative originality and priority of the whole in relation to its parts (Wikipedia)

[5] Resource - by this word Marvin Minsky means any of the separate centers that perform a specific function. For example, the Wernicke Center in the brain is responsible for understanding speech.

[6] Emergence - irreducibility of system properties to the sum of properties of its components (wikipedia)

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For the translation, thanks to Victor Ivanov. Who wants to help with the translation - write in a personal or mail magisterludi2016@yandex.ru

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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