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The Society of Mind

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1. Prologue

"Much of the power of the mind seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. If so, that complication [of the structure of this book] can't be helped; it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks."

  • The Agents of the Mind - Minds are built from mindless agents, parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we'd consider smart. Our theory must span three scales of time:
    • Slow - for the billion years in which our brains have evolved.
    • Fast - for the fleeting weeks and months of infancy and childhood
    • In-Between - for the centuries of growth of our ideas through history
  • The Mind and the Brain - Psychologists, like Freud and Piaget, and mathematicians, like Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing contributed ideas that were brought together in the 1940s to show how machines might be made to see, reason, and remember
  • The Society of Mind - Many many processes are going on in our minds and bodies all the time to allow us to walk, drink a cup of tea and hold conversations. These things seem so natural that we take them for granted, but they all take vasts amounts of machinery
  • The World of Blocks - Though all adults know how to build a tower of blocks, no one understands how we learn to do them! This amnesia of infancy makes us think that all our abilities were always there inside our minds, and we don't take time to ask how they began and grew.
  • Common Sense - Is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances, and check
    • As each new group of skills matures, we build more layers on top of them. As time goes on, the layers below become increasingly remote until, when we try to speak of them in later life, we find ourselves with little more to say than "I don't know".
  • Agents and Agencies - Block Builder and other agents have "agency" in that they seem to know how to do their jobs, but as "agents" cannot know anything at all. Every time we seem to find an agent with intelligence, we must look inside it to break it down smaller
    • When you drive a car, you don't care how it works, but when something goes wrong you have to look inside it to see. But you can't be thinking about the detailed interior when you are driving, or you will crash
    • Knowing how is not the same as knowing why
    • We'll constantly switch between the viewpoints of agents and agencies.

2. Wholes and Parts

  • Components and Connections - First we must know how each separate part works. Second, we must know how each part interacts with those to which it is connected. And third, we have to understand how all these local interactions combine to accomplish what that system does - as seen from the outside.
  • Novelists and Reductionists :
    • Reductionists - Are people who prefer to build on old ideas. They are usually right - at least at science's cautious core, where novelties rarely survive for long.
    • Novelists - are people who like to champion new hypotheses. Outside science's core, older ideas have had more time to show their flaws
    • We need to approach our descriptions at various different levels and each higher level of description must add to our knowledge about lower levels.
    • Physics has only a dozen basic principles that are combined into explanations, while psychology may need to combine hundreds of smaller theories.
  • Parts and Wholes - It's hard to explain what it happening in our brains, but talking about "more than the sum of its parts" won't help us.
  • Holes and Parts - We can't use words like life and mind to describe the smallest components of living things because these words were invented to describe how larger assemblies interact.
  • Easy Things are Hard - In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best. It's mainly when our other systems start to fail that we engage the special agencies involved with what we call consciousness. We'"re more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly.
  • Are People Machines? - Let's put aside this argument for now. We're certainly not trivial machines, but we are getting better and better at making highly sophisticated machines with millions of parts.

3. Conflict and Compromise

  • Conflict - Agencies like "Play" must compete with other agencies like "Eat" and "Sleep". Conflicts within agencies tend to migrate to higher levels.
  • Noncompromise - The Principle of Noncompromise: The longer an internal conflict persists among an agent's subordinates, the weaker becomes that agent's status among its own competitors. If such internal problems aren't settles soon, other agents will take control and the agents formerly involved will be "dismissed".
    • We sometimes settle disputes by appealing to superiors, but other conflicts never end and never cease to trouble us.
    • Tiny mental agents don't know enough to negotiate with each other. Only larger agencies could be resourceful enough to do such things.
  • Hierarchies - The relations between agents are hierarchical with "Builder" being like a high-level executive, far removed from those subordinates who actually produce the final product. But there is no real planning or assignments happening or ways to deal with unexpected events.
  • Heterarchies - But there are also heterarchies where agents require cooperation and no one is legitimately in charge of the other.
  • Destructiveness - Destructive acts can serve constructive goals by leaving fewer problems to be solved. There are no simple causes for destructive acts, and no need for zero-sum games. When Sleep starts, Play can still run, with the child building towers in its dreams.
  • Pain and Pleasure Simplified - They both make it hard to think of other things, thus simplifying your point of view.

4. The Self

  • The Self - We don't know what we mean by "self". We'll use the following terms:
    • Self-Images - Beliefs about what we are, are capable of, and may be disposed to do. We use these beliefs when we solve problems or make plans.
    • Self-Ideals - Ideas about what we'd like to be and what we ought to be, which have guided our growth from infancy. May be hard to express, because they are (can be?) inaccessible to consciousness.
  • One Self or Many? - We all sometimes have feelings of disunity, conflicting motives, compulsions, internal tensions and dissensions. Perhaps, paradoxically, it is because there are no persons in our heads, that we construct the myth that we're inside ourselves.
  • The Soul - Beliefs in souls are insinuations that we're helpless to improve ourselves. But the value of a human self is not in some small precious core, but in its vast, constructed crust.
  • The Conservative Self - One function of the self is to keep us from changing too rapidly. If we changed our minds too recklessly, we could never know what we might want next. We'd never get much done because we could never depend on ourselves.
  • Exploitation - If work could simply turn off sleep, we'd quickly wear our bodies out. If work could simply switch anger on, we'd be fighting all the time. Directness is too dangerous. We'd die. If self-control were easy to obtain, we'd end up accomplishing nothing at all.
  • Self-Control - Willpower, activity, expression, chemistry, emotion, attachment - so many schemes for self-control! How do we choose which ones to use? There isn't any easy way. Self-discipline takes years to learn. It grows inside us stage by stage.
  • Long-Range Plans - The easiest path to "self-control" is doing only what one is already disposed to do.
    • Which are our slowest-changing agencies of all? Later we'll see that these must include the silent, hidden agencies that shape what we call character. These are the systems that are concerned no merely with the things we want, but with what we want ourselves to be - that is the ideals that we set for ourselves.
  • Ideals - Without enduring self-ideals, our lives would lack coherence. As individuals, we'd never be able to trust ourselves to carry out our personal plans. In a social group no one person would be able to trust the others. A working society must evolve mechanisms that stabilize ideals - and many of the social principles that each of us regards as personal are really "long-term memories" in which our cultures stores what they have learned across the centuries.

5. Individuality

  • Circular Causality - We often speak of "straightening things out" when we're involved in situations that seem too complicated. It seems to me that this metaphor reflects how hard it is to find one's way through a maze that has complicated loops in it. In such a situation, we always try to find a path through it by seeking causal explanations that go in only one direction, and we can apply the vary same types of reasoning to everything that we can represent in terms of chains of causes and effects.
  • Unanswerable Questions - All human cultures evolve institutions of law, religion, and philosophy, and these institutions both adopt specific answers to circular questions and establish authority-schemes to indoctrinate people with those beliefs. Does this to substitute dogma for reason and truth? Maybe, but in exchange, they spare whole populations from wasting time in fruitless reason loops. Minds can lead more productive lives when working on problems that can be solved.
  • The Remote-Control Self - The idea of a single, central Self doesn't explain anything. Maybe we believe it because so much of what our minds do is hidden from the parts of us that are involved with verbal consciousness.
  • Personal Identity - In order to keep control, we simplify how we represent what's happening and then, when that complicated mental scene is straightened out it seems as though a single pipeline of ideas were flowing through the mind. Thinking of ourselves as a single thing helps with:
    • The Physical World - We can base our plans on having a single body.
    • Personal Privacy - We must remember to whom we have told something, and individuals give us a sense of responsibility.
    • Mental Activity - Thinking two different thoughts from different agencies is confusing
  • Fashion and Style - Fredkin's paradox: The more equally attractive two alternatives seem, the harder it can be to choose between them. Aesthetics are useful for:
    • Recognisibility - Familiar styles make it easier for us to recognize and classify the things we see.
    • Uniformity - Uniform styles protect us from useless distractions
    • Predictability - Societies need rules that make sense for individuals
  • Traits - We try to be consistent and to think that others are consistent, because this is easier.
  • Permanent Identity - We all experience that sense of changelessness in spite of change.

6. Insight and Introspection

  • Consciousness - Turning our bodies and walking in a direction is much like turning a car and driving - in both cases we are aware only of a general intention and all the rest takes care of itself. Our conscious thoughts use signal-signs to steer the engines in our minds, controlling countless processes of which we're never much aware. Not understanding how it's done, we learn to gain our ends by sending signals to those great machines, much as the sorcerers of older times used rituals to cast spells.
  • Signals and Signs - How do we understand anything? Almost always, I think, by using one or another kind of analogy - that is by representing each new thing as though it resembles something we already know. Whenever a new thing's internal workings are too strange or complicated to deal with directly, we represent whatever parts of it we can in terms of more familiar signs:
    • To overstate the case a bit, what we call consciousness consists of little more than menu lists that flash, from time to time, on mental screen displays that other systems use. Like computer game players using symbols to invoke complicated processes of which they know nothing.
    • You can scarcely see a hammer except as something to hit with, or see a ball except as something to throw and catch. Why do we see things less as they are and more in view of how they can be used? It is because our minds did not evolve to serve as instruments for science or philosophy, but to solve practical problems of nutrition, defense, procreation, and the like. We tend to think of knowledge as good in itself, but knowledge is useful only when we can exploit it to help us reach our goals.
  • Thought Experiments - Why is it so hard to explain the results of experiments of imagining things in our minds? Because we get confused. Our thoughts about our mind-experiments are mind-experiments themselves - and therefore interfere with one another:
    • Thinking affects our thoughts.
  • B-Brains - The only way to get a brain to keep track of itself is to split it into two parts, A and B. Connect A to the world and connect B only to A. Then A is the B-Brain's world.
  • Frozen Reflection - When introspection seems to work, it's not because we've found a magic way to see inside ourselves. Instead, it means that we've done some well-designed experiment.
  • Momentary Mental Time - No portion of a mind can ever know everything that is happening at the same time in all the other agencies. Because of this, each agency must have at least a slightly different sense both of what has happened in the past - and of what is happening "now". Each different agent of the mind lives in a slightly different world of time.
  • The Causal Now - Our everyday ideas about the progression of mental time are wrong: they leave no room for the fact that every agent has a different causal history. To be sure, those different pasts are intermixed over longer spans of time, and every agent is eventually influenced by what has happened in the common, remote history of its society. But that's not one means by "now". The problem is with the connections between the moment-to-moment activities of largely separate agencies.
  • Thinking Without Thinking - If we're aware of anything at all, it is that "I'm aware - hence I'm aware." yet what do such convictions really mean? If self-awareness means to know what's happening inside one's mind, no realist could maintain for long that people have much insight in the literal sense of seeing-in.
  • Heads in the Clouds - Even in your own mind, you can never know precisely what you mean! How useless any thought would be if, afterward, your mind return to the selfsame state. But that never happens, because every time we think about a certain thing, our thoughts go off in different ways:
    • The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. It's almost always wrong to seek the "real meaning" of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
    • An idea with a single sense can lead you along only one track. Then, if anything goes wrong, it just gets stuck - it sits in your mind with nowhere to go. When someone learns something by rote (ie with no sensible connections) we say they don't really understand. Rich meaning-networks, however give you many different ways to go: if you can't solve a problem one way, you can try another. Too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected meaning structures let you turn ideas around in your mind, to consider alternatives and envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works. And that's what we mean by thinking!
    • David Hume: "What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection of different perceptions, united together by certain relations and suppos'd, tho' falsely, to be endow'd with a perfect simplicity and identity."
  • Worlds Out of Mind - There is no singularly real world of thought; each mind evolves its own internal universe.
    • We appear to like best worlds of thought where goals and actions mesh in regions large enough to spend our lives in - and become a Buddhist, Republican, pet, or topologist.
    • Some mental starting points grow into great, coherent continents. In certain parts of maths, science, and philosophy, a relatively few but clear ideas may lead into an endless realm of complex yet consistent new structures. Yet even in maths, a handful of seemingly innocent rules can lead to complications far beyond our grasp.
    • In mental realms we make up countless artificial schemes to force things to seem orderly, by specifying legal codes, grammar rules and traffic laws. When growing up in such a world, it all seems right and natural - and only scholars and historians recall the mass of precedents and failed experiments it took to make it work so well. These "natural" worlds are actually more complex than the technical worlds of philosophy. They're far too vast to comprehend - except where we impose on them the rules we make.
    • In some cases, an accident of mental stress has temporarily suppressed the capacity to question, doubt, or probe. The mind has found a way to simplify itself - this may lead to a sense of revelation, but perhaps no problem has been solved at all.
  • In-Sight - Where do we get the ideas we need? Most of our concepts come from the communities in which we're raised. Even the ideas we "get" for ourselves come from communities - this time the ones in our heads. Brains don't manufacture thoughts in the direct ways that muscles exert forces or ovaries make estrogens; instead, to get a good idea, one must engage huge organizations of submachines that do a vast variety of jobs.
  • Internal Communication - We overestimate how much we actually communicate. Instead, despite those seemingly important differences, much of what we do is based on common knowledge and experience. Although we can't express what we mean, we can often cite various example to indicate how to connect structures we're sure must already exist inside the listener's mind. In short we can often indicate which sorts of thoughts to think, even though we can't express how they operate.
    • We find it particularly hard to use our language skills to talk about the parts of the mind that learned such skills as balancing, seeing, and remembering, before we started to learn to speak.
  • Self-Knowledge is Dangerous - Why do we become bored when doing the same thing over and over, even if that activity was pleasant at first? Without variety, our pleasure systems tend to satiate. Every learning system must have some such protective scheme, since otherwise it could get trapped into endlessly repeating the same activity. It's good that we have such mechanisms and that they are very hard to suppress.
  • Confusion - It's mainly when our systems fail that consciousness becomes engaged. It is better to realize that one is confused as opposed to being confused without knowing it. Then we can apply our intellect to alter or repair the defective process.

7. Problems and Goals

  • Intelligence - Our minds contain processes that enable us to solve problems we consider difficult. "Intelligence" is our name for whichever of those processes we don't yet understand.
  • Uncommon Sense - Much of "expert" adult thinking is actually simpler than what is involved when ordinary children play!
    • What people call common sense is actually more intricate than most of the technical expertise we admire. Think of all the different kinds of things a child must know merely to build a house of blocks - shapes and colors, space and time, support and balance, and an ability to keep track of what one is doing.
    • To be considered an "expert" one needs a large amount of knowledge of only a relatively few varieties. In contrast, an ordinary person's "common sense" involves a much larger variety of different types of knowledge - and this requires more complicated management systems.
    • Each type of knowledge needs some form of "representation" and a body of skills adapted to using that style of representation. Once that investment has been made, it is relatively easy for a specialist to accumulate further knowledge, provided the additional expertise is uniform enough to suit the same style of representation. The greater variety of representations would make it much harder for a single person to learn to deal with a few diseases, law cases, architectural blueprints, and orchestral scores. It would be like learning many different languages, each with its own grammar, lexicon, and idioms.
  • The Puzzle Principle - We can program a computer to solve any problem by trial and error, without knowing how to solve it in advance, provided only that we have a way to recognize when the problem is solved. Without some notion of progress toward a goal, it is hard to do better than mindless chance.
  • Problem Solving - The most powerful way we know for discovering how to solve a hard problem is to find a method that splits it into several simpler ones, each of which can be solved separately.
    • The Progress Principle - Any process of exhaustive search can be greatly reduced if we possess some way to detect when "progress" has been made. Then we can trace a path toward a solution, just as a person can climb an unfamiliar hill in the dark - by feeling around, at every step, to find the direction of steepest ascent.
    • Many easy problems can be solved this way, but for a hard problem, it may be almost as difficult to recognize "progress" as to solve the problem itself. Without a larger overview, that "hill climber" may get stuck forever on some minor peak and never find the mountaintop. There is no foolproof way to avoid this.
    • The most efficient way to solve a problem is to already know how to solve it. Then one can avoid search entirely.
  • Learning and Memory - Those twin ideas - reward/success and punish/failure - do not explain enough about how people learn to produce the new ideas that enable them to solve difficult problems that could not otherwise be solved without many lifetimes of ineffectual trial and error. The answer must lie in learning better ways to learn.
    • At each moment, we must keep track of what we've just done, we must somehow maintain our goals and, finally, once the problem is solved, we need access to records of how it was done, for use when similar problems arise in the future.
    • When a human brain solves a hard problem, many millions of agents and processes are involved. Which agents could be wise enough to guess what changes should then be made? Where in the mind are judgements made about which agents merit praise or blame?
  • Reinforcement and Reward - We cannot learn to solve hard problems by indiscriminately reinforcing agents or their connections. Why is it that among all the animals, only the great-brained relatives of man can learn to solve problems that require many steps or involve using the same agencies for different purposes?
  • Local Responsibility - Local schemes reward each agent that helps accomplish its supervisor's goal. Global schemes reward only agents that help accomplish top-level goals.
    • It is harder to implement a global learning scheme, which is much more parsimonious, and global policies lead to learning more slowly. We need to learn which learning strategies to use, depending on the circumstances.
  • Difference-Engines - A goal-driven system does not seem to react directly to the stimuli or situations it encounters. Instead, it treats the things it finds as objects to exploit, avoid, or ignore, as though it were concerned with something else that doesn't yet exist. When any disturbance or obstacle diverts a goal-directed system from its course, that system seems to try to remove the interference, go around it, or turn it to some advantage.
    • A difference engine must contain a description of a desired situation.
    • It must have subagents that are aroused by various differences between the desired situation and the actual situation.
    • Each subagent must act in a way that tends to diminish the difference that aroused it.
  • Intentions - The difference-engine scheme scheme remains the most useful conception of goal, purpose, or intention yet discovered. It embodies both a representation of some outcome and a mechanism to make it persist until that outcome is achieved.
  • Genius - Most heroes are intensely motivated, proficient in some field, and stubborn. But genius needs unusually effective ways to learn. You must learn a lot and manage what you learn, using special knacks of higher-order expertise:
    • Such knacks could begin with early accidents when a child happens upon clever ways of arranging blocks, etc. But adults cannot necessarily see these internal strategies, which can lead to silent growth in which some better ways to learn may lead to better ways to learn to learn. Then later we'll observe an awesome, qualitative change, with no apparent cause and call it a talent, aptitude, or gift.

8. A Theory of Memory

Proust: "In truth, the person within me who was at this moment enjoying this impression enjoyed in it the qualities which it possessed that were common to both an earlier day and the present moment; and this person came into play only when, by this process of identifying past with present, he could find himself in the only environment in which he could live, that is to say, entirely outside of time."

  • K-Lines: A Theory of Memory - We keep each thing we learn close to the agents that learn it in the first place, using a type of agent called a Knowledge-line or K-line. We memorize what we're thinking about by making a list of the agents involved in that activity.
    • Whenever you get a good idea, solve a problem, or have a memorable experience, you activate a K-line to represent it. A K-line is a wirelike structure that attaches itself to whichever mental agents are active when you solve a problem or have a good idea.
    • When you activate that K-line later, the agents attached to it are aroused, putting you into a mental state much like the one you were in when you solved that problem or got that idea. This should make it relatively easy for you to solve new, similar problems.
    • Each agent can become attached to many different K-lines
    • For each familiar kind of mental job, your K-lines can refill your mind with fragments of ideas you've used before on similar jobs. In such a moment, you become in those respects more like an earlier version of yourself.
  • Re-membering - When facing a new problem which is similar to an old problem, you activate an old K-line, kP, alongside your recent thoughts, Q, and both sets of agents will work together to solve today's problem. This is the simplest concept of what memories are and how they are formed.
    • If we give too much priority to the K-line's agents, we risk re-arousing old states of mind so strongly that they overwhelm our present thoughts and lost track of what we're thinking now and wipe out all the work we've done. We only want some hints, suggestion, and ideas.
    • The ideal scheme would activate exactly those P's that would be most helpful in solving the present problem, but judging that is hard.
  • Mental States and Dispositions - K-lines can easily record relatively widespread and diffuse activities and, later, reactivate them all at once.
    • The experiences we find easiest to recollect are often just the kinds we find the hardest to describe.
    • In order fot a word to have a predictable effect on other persons, we must maintain strict, public discipline on how it is used - whereas each person's private, internal signals need not be so constrained.
    • The traditional view, that it is easy to understand how minds can deal with facts and propositions but hard to see how minds could have diffuse, hard-to-express dispositions, must be upside-down
  • Partial Mental States:
    • A total state of mind is a list that specifies which agents are active and which are quiet at a certain moment
    • A partial state of mind merely specifies that certain agents are active but does not say which other agents are quiet
    • The "entire system" can "think several thoughts at once" because each of these thoughts is contained in a partial state of mind just like a crowd of separate people can.
  • Level Bands - Understanding never ends! - we can always find more to say about a situation. We learn by attaching agents to K-lines, but we don't attach them all with equal firmness. We make strong connections at a certain level of detail, but we make weaker connections at higher and lower levels.
    • The weakly attachments are assumptions by default, which will serve unless and until they must be overridden by a specificity.
  • Levels - The sorts of knowledge in mid-level bands is most broadly and generally useful, whereas uppermost and lowest-level bands are more likely to be based on aspects of the problem that are specific to an older goal or to the particular details of the original problem.
    • It is no accident that level-related ideas play many different roles in how we think.
  • Fringes - Suppose some memory were so complete that it made you relive, in every detail, some perfect moment of your past. That would erase your present you - and you'd forget what you had asked your memory to do! Fringing effects make our memories more relevant to our present purposes. In order to think, we need intimate connections between things and goals - between structures and their functions. What use would thinking be at all, unless we could relate each thing's details to our plans and intentions?
    • Lower Band - Beyond a certain level of detail, increasingly complete memories of previous situations are increasingly difficult to match to new situations. The lower fringe is commonly concerned with the structure of things, and the objective details of reality
    • Upper Band - Memories that arouse agents at too high a level would tend to provide us with goals that are not appropriate to the present situation. The upper fringe is commonly involved with the functions of things and our subjective concerns with goals and intentions
  • Societies of Memories - As we make new memories, we prefer to attach to existing K-lines than to individual agents.
    • Jack to Male, Young:
    • Kite to Paper, String, Red
    • Fly to Outside, Wind
    • Connecting new K-lines to old ones will not recapture so many of the scene's precise, perceptual details. Instead, the kinds of mental states that this hierarchical type of memory produces will be based more on stereotypes and default assumptions than on actual perceptions. You will tend to remember only what you recognized at the time.
  • Knowledge-Trees - When making a new K-line memory, do not connect it to all the K-lines active at the time but only to those that are active within a certain level-band. Eventually all of our knowledge-structures become entangled with various sorts of exceptions, shortcuts, and cross-connections. No matter: the level-band idea will still apply in general, since most of what we know will still be mainly hierarchical because of how our knowledge grows.
  • Levels and Classifications - We tend to think that our hierarchies illustrate some kind of order that exists in the world but frequently they come from the mind and merely appear to belong to the world.
    • We frequently use two or more classifications at the same time. A child can play with a porcelain duck as though it were a pretend animal but still behave in an appropriate way for a delicate china object.
    • When attempting a new task, we never like to start anew: we try to use what has worked previously. So we search around inside our minds for old ideas to use. Then, when part of any hierarchy seems to work, we drag the rest along with it.
  • Layers of Societies - We can imagine an endless sequence of societies or agencies in which each new one learns to exploit the last. This is how minds develop in infancy, as layers of societies.
    • Each new layer begins as a set of K-lines, which starts by learning to exploit whatever skills have been acquired by the previous layer. Whenever a layer acquires some useful and substantial skill, it tends to stop learning and changing - and then yet another new layer can begin to learn to exploit the capabilities of the last.
    • Each new layer begins as a student, learning new ways to use what older layers can already do. Then it slows its learning rate - and starts to serve both as subject and as teacher to the layers that form afterward.

9. Summaries

  • Wanting and Liking - Our reactions of pleasure or disgust are only superficial summaries of pyramids of underlying processes.
    • The surer you are that you like what you are doing, the more completely your other ambitions are being suppressed.
    • The relation between wanting and liking is not simple at all, because our preferences are the end products of so many negotiations among our agencies. To accomplish any substantial goal, we must renounce the other possibilities and engage machinery to keep ourselves from succumbing to nostalgia or remorse. Then we use words like "liking" to express the operation of the mechanisms that hold us to our choice.
    • Liking's job is shutting off alternatives. It narrows down our choices and provides artificial clarity.
  • Gerrymandering - What is the significance in complicated systems of those pleasant feelings of accomplishment and disagreeable sensations of defeat? They must be involved with how our higher-level agencies make summaries. No single sense of good or bad can reflect much of what went on inside all your agencies; too much information must be concealed, but there are many reasons for oversimplifying.
  • Learning from Failure - Some parts of our minds learn from success, but other portions learn mainly when we make mistakes, by remembering the circumstances in which various methods failed to work. We can learn what not to do and what not to think, which permeates our minds with taboos and prohibitions of which we're entirely unaware.
    • It is no accident that there are no exceptions to the rules in mathematical worlds. There we start with the rules and imagine only objects that obey them. But perfect logic rarely works in the real worlds of people, thoughts, and things. We can't so willfully make up the rules for objects that already exist, so our only course is to begin with imperfect guesses - collections of rough and ready rules - and then to proceed to find our where they're wrong.
  • Enjoying Discomfort - Nothing would get done if we succumbed to satisfaction. When doing maths, climbing freezing mountain peaks, or playing pipe organs with our feet: some parts of the mind find it horrible, while other parts enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them. We seem to have no names for processes like these, though they must be among our most important ways to grow.

10. Papert's Principle

  • Piaget's Experiments - Each normal child eventually acquires an adult view of quantity - apparently without adult help!
  • Reasoning About Amounts - We do not learn one single, underlying "concept of quantity". Instead, each person must construct a multilevel agency, the Society-of-More, that finds different ways to deal with quantities.
    • Younger children may possess the ideas they need, but don't know how to apply them! They lack adequate knowledge about their knowledge or have not acquired the checks and balances required to select or override their hordes of agents with different perceptions and priorities.
    • It is not enough to be able to use many kinds of reasoning; one also must know which to use in different circumstances! Learning is more than the accumulation of skills. Whatever we learn, there is always more to learn - about how to use what we already learned.
  • Priorities - Young children may place their agents in some order of priority. Most people seem most sensitive to vertical extents. This may be built into our brains or learned, but more height often goes along with other sorts of largeness. No other agent seems so good as Tall for making everyday comparisons.
  • Papert's Principle - Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows.
    • The processes which assemble agents into groups must somehow exploit relationships among the skills of those agents. Because Tall and Thin are more similar in character to one another than to Confined, it makes sense to group them more closely together in the administrative hierarchy.
  • The Society of More - Each higher-level agent embodies a form of higher-order knowledge that helps us organize ourselves by telling us when and how to use the things we know. Without a many layered management, we couldn't use the knowledge in our low-level agencies; they'd all keep gettin in one another's way.
  • About Piaget's Experiments - Stage magicians find that making things disappear does not entertain the youngest children; presumably that are too used to encountering the unexplainable. What happens when More cannot decide what to do? That depends upon the states of other agencies - including those involved in dealing with frustration, restlessness, and boredom.
  • The Concept of Concept - How do children accumulate and classify their many methods for comparing things? No child has the time to generate and test all possible combinations to find which ones are sensible. Instead, always try to combine related agents first.
  • Education and Development - We can't force children to learn too quickly. There is constantly a tension between organising a hierarchy of concepts and managing the mass of exceptions and only the mature mind can combine the two.
  • Learning a Hierarchy - The nerve cells in an animal's brain can't always move aside to make more room for extra ones. So these new layers might indeed have to be located elsewhere, attached by bundles of connection wires. No aspect of the brain's anatomy is more striking than its huge masses of connection bundles.

11. The Shape of Space

  • Seeing Red - We are not "simple" machines. When we see something, it activates many, many agents.
  • The Shape of Space - We never actually make any direct contact with the outside world. Instead, we work with models of the world that we build inside our brains.
    • Einstein spoke of vast societies of nearnesses.
    • There is little that one could say about any "single touch" - or about what any single sense-detecting agent does. However, there is much more to be said about the relations between two or more skin touches, because the closer together two skin spots are, the more frequently they'll both be touched at the same time.
  • Nearnesses - In general, each pair of nearby places on the skin is wired to nearby places in the brain.
    • Other things being equal, the apparent similarity of two stimuli will depend on the extent to which they lead to similar activities in other agencies.
    • Given enough information, a suitably designed agency could assemble a sort of map to represent which spots are close together on the skin.
    • For a child, learning about the spatial world beyond the skin is a journey that stretches over many years.
  • Innate Geography - To design a machine to deduce the geography of a space, one could begin with a layer of "correlation agents", one for each tiny patch of skin, each engineered to detect which other skin spots are most often aroused at nearly the same times; those will then be mapped as the nearest ones. A second layer of similar agents could then begin to make maps of larger regions, and several such layers would eventually asemble a sequence of maps on various scales, for representing several levels of detail.
    • If brains do something of this sort, it might explain why we all agreed on what the outer world of space is like.
  • Sensing Similarities - Our thoughts are largely shaped by which things seem most similar. Which colors seem the most alike? Which forms and shapes, which smells and tastes, which timbres, pitches, pains and aches, which feelings and sensations seem most similar? Such judgements have a huge effect at every stage of mental growth - since what we learn depends on how we classify.
    • Just as there is nothing to say about a single point, there's nothing to be said about an isolated sensory signal. When our Redness, Touch, or Toothache agents send their signals to our brains, each by itself can only say, "I'm here." The rest of what such signals "mean" to us depends on how they're linked to all our other agencies.
    • The qualities of signals sent to brains depend only on relationships - the same as with the shapeless points of space.
    • Beyond the raw distinctiveness of every separate stimulus, all other aspects of its character or quality - be it of touch, taste, sound, or light - depend entirely on its relationships with the other agents of your mind.
  • The Centered Self - We really do not understand how the child learns to understand space. Perhaps we start by small experiments to produce crude maps of the skin. Next we might correlate these with the motions of our eyes and limbs, then develop some agents to represent a few places outside the skin, assemble an agency that represents a network of relationships, trajectories, and directions between those places and slowly expand that network to include new places and relationships.
    • Freud and Piaget observed that children seem to recapitulate the history of astronomy: first they see the world centered around themselves, before slowly learning that they are moving, like any object within a stationary universe.
  • Predestined Learning - Every child eventually learns to reach for food. Each child lives through a different history of "reaching-act" experiences but, according to our theory of "nearness models of space", they will all end up with generally similar results because that outcome is constrained by the nearness relations of real-world space.
    • We acquire our conceptions of space by using agencies that learn in accord with processes determined by inheritance. We learn from experience, but the outcomes of our learning are virtually predestined by the spatial geometry of our body parts.
  • Half-Brains - Our brains have many pairs of agencies, arranged like mirror-images, with huge bundles of nerves running between them. Each brain has many parts, not only two.
    • A theory - In early life we start with mostly similar agencies on either side. Later, as we grow more complex, a combination of genetic and circumstantial effects lead one of each pair to take control of both to avoid being paralyzed by conflicts. Eventually the adult managers for many skills would tend to develop on the side of the brain most concerned with language because those agencies connect to an unusually large number of other agencies. The less dominant side of the brain will continue to develop, but with fewer administrative functions - and end up with more of our lower-level skills, but with less involvement in plans and higher-level goals that engage many agencies at once. Then if, by accident, that brain half is abandoned to itself, it will seem more childish and less mature because it lags so far behind in administrative growth.
  • Dumbbell Theories - Dividing things in two is a good way to start, but one should always try to find at least a third alternative. If one cannot, one should suspect that there may not be two ideas at all, but only one, together with some form of opposite.

12. Learning Meaning

  • A Block-Arch Scenario - A child evolves a concept of arch through experimentation.
  • Learning Meaning - The child is led to learn for itself in order to account for strange events. There are various forms of learning:
    • Uniframing - combining several descriptions into one, eg by observing that all the arches have certain common parts.
    • Accumulating - Collecting incompatible descriptions, eg by forming the phrase "block or wedge".
    • Reformulating - Modifying a description's character, eg by describing the separate blocks rather than the overall shape.
    • Trans-framing - Bridging between structures and functions or actions, eg by relating the concept of arch to the act of changing hands.
  • Uniframes - There are good reasons not to notice too much, for every seemingly essential fact can generate a universe of useless, accidental, and even misleading facts.
    • Most differences are redundant. Most of the rest are accidents.
    • On what basis can we decide which features are essential and which are merely accidents? Such questions don't make sense apart from how we want to use their answers. There is no single secret, magic trick to learning: we simply have to learn a large society of different ways to learn!
  • Structure and Function - Our most powerful ways of thinking are those that let us bring together things we've learned in different contexts. And to do this we need to build arches between the contexts in our minds.
  • The Functions of Structures - We need both structural descriptions for recognizing chairs when we see them and functional descriptions in order to know what we can do with them. We can capture more of what we mean by interweaving both ideas.
  • Accumulation - The simplest way to learn, when we can't find a uniframe, is to accumulate descriptions of experiences.
    • A simpler theory of when we start new uniframes would be that in the brain, there is an architectural constraint on how many K-lines are directly accessible to various types of agents. For example, the agents in a certain agency might be able to accumulate no more than about seven branches for each classification in a certain hierarchy. When there are more, the agency would be forced either to merge some examples into uniframes or to turn for help from somewhere else.
  • Accumulation Strategies - Whenever an accumulation becomes too large and clumsy, we try to replace some groups of its members with a uniframe. But even when we succeed in finding a suitably compact uniframe, we can expect it, too, to accumulate exceptions eventually, since first descriptions rarely work for all our later purposes.
    • Our various motives and concerns are likely to require incompatible ways to classify things. You can't predict a dog's bite from its bark. Each classification must embody different kinds of knowledge, and we can rarely use more than a few of them at once. When we have a goal that is simple and clear, we may be able to select one particular kind of description that makes the problem easy to solve. But when goals of several types conflict, it is harder to know just what to do.
  • Problems of Disunity - Many good ideas are really two ideas in one - which form a bridge between two realms of thought or different points of view.
    • Whenever we build a bridge between structure and function, one end of that bridge may represent a goal or use, while the other end describes what we might use to gain those ends. But it is rare for those structures to correspond neatly to those functions. The problem is that we usually find many different ways to achieve any goal.
    • Our different worlds of ends and means don't usually match up very well. So when we find a useful, compact uniframe in one such world, it often corresponds to an accumulation in our other worlds.
  • The Exception Principle - It rarely pays to tamper with a rule that nearly always works. It's better just to complement it with an accumulation of specific exceptions.
    • Children are disturbed to hear that whales are not fish because they are usually more concerned with uses and appearances than with origins and mechanisms. They want to know what do animals do, where do they live, are they easy to catch, are they dangerous, are they useful, what do they eat, how do they taste?
    • The power of ordinary words like "fish" comes from how we make them span so many meaning-worlds at once. But, to do this, we have to be able to tolerate many exceptions. We almost never find rules that have no exceptions - except in artificial worlds that we ourselves create by making up their rules and regulations to begin with.
  • How Towers Work - An idea will seem self-evident - once you've forgotten learning it. Many obvious things are done for us by huge, silent systems in our mind, built over long forgotten years of childhood, and which leave no traces in our consciousness.
    • To understand the world of space and time, each child must make many discovered. But the division into Lifting and Sliding has a special importance. We don't have to learn all the ways to move in the world because we can learn to deal with each dimension separately. Lifting isolates the vertical dimension and sliding isolates the horizontal, and that is enough to move around in a 3D world.
  • How Causes Work - There can't be any "causes" in a world in which everything that happens depends more or less equally upon everything else that happens.
    • To know the cause of a phenomenon is to know, at least in principle, how to change or control some aspects of some entities without affecting all the rest. The most useful kinds of causes our minds can discern are predictable relationships between the actions we can take and the changes we can sense.
  • Meaning and Definition - It is no great surprise to find that "game" has a more psychological character than does "brick", which we can define in physical terms without referring to our goals. But most ideas lie in between, eg "chair", which we cannot describe without referring both to a physical structure and to a psychological function.
  • Bridge-Definitions - Our best ideas are often those that bridge between two different worlds. We can often capture an idea by squeezing in from several sides at once, to get exactly what we need by using two or more different kinds of descriptions at the same time.
    • Purposeful definitions are usually too loose - They include many things we do not intend.
    • Structural definitions are usually too tight - They reject many things we want to include.
    • Combining them helps us connect things we can recognize (or make, find, do, or think) to problems we want to solve.
    • To learn to use a new or unfamiliar word, you start by taking it to be a sign that there exists, inside some other person's mind, a structure you could use. But no matter how carefully it is explained, you must still rebuild that thought yourself, from materials already in your own mind. A good definition helps, but you still must mold and shape each new idea to suit your own existing skills - hoping to make it work for you the way it seems to work for those from whom you learn.
    • What people call "meanings" do not usually correspond to particular and definite structures, but to connections among and across fragments of the great interlocking networks of connections and constraints among our agencies. Because these networks are constantly growing and changing, meanings are rarely sharp, and we cannot always expect to be able to "define" them in terms of compact sequences of words. Verbal explanations serve only as partial hints; we also have to learn from watching, working, playing - and thinking.

13. Seeing and Believing

  • Reformulation - Reformulating a problem in new terms can unblock a problem, but how do people find new styles of description that make their problems seem easier?
  • Boundaries - We're always changing boundaries! Where does an elbow start or end? When does a youth become an adult? Where does an ocean change into a sea? Why must our minds keep drawing lines to structure our reality? Because otherwise, we'd never see anything at all! We rarely see anything twice as exactly the same. Each time we're almost certain to be looking from a somewhat different view, perhaps from nearer or farther, higher or lower, in a different color or shade of light, or against a different background.
  • Seeing and Believing - Children draw unrealistic human shapes (without a body) because they don't have anything like a picture in mind, but only some network of relationships that various features must satisfy.
  • Children's Drawing-Frames - Why do older children draw the body separately? They understand the relationships a bit better.
  • Learning a Script - How does practice speed things up?
    • Frank Lloyd Wright: "An expert is one who does not have to think. He knows."
    • Experts seem to exercise their special skills with scarcely any thought at all - as though they were simply reading preassembled scripts. Perhaps when we practice to improve our skills, we're mainly building simpler scripts that don't engage so many agencies. This lets us do old things with much less "thought" and gives us more time to think of other things. The less the child has to think of where to put each arm and leg, the more time remains to represent what that picture-person is actually doing.
  • The Frontier Effect - The tendency to place new features at locations that have easily described relationships to other, already represented features.
    • Copying is much more complicated than we think. You have to draw each line to a scale and direction consistent with all the others. So it is actually easier for a child to first construct a mental description of the relations involved in the scene, and then to design a drawing-scheme to represent those relationships.
    • It can require more skill to produce what we regard as a simple copy or imitation than to produce what we consider to be an "abstract" representation.
  • Duplications - Different kinds of goals require different styles of description.

14. Reformulation

  • Using Reformulations - If we can't solve a problem, we can try to find a way to describe it in different terms. Reformulation is the most powerful way to attempt to escape from what seems to be a hopeless situation.
    • To outsiders it may see that creative people have an endless source of novel ways to deal with things, but they often have merely variations on far fewer themes. For the creatives, they may think, why can't outsiders understand how to think about these simple kinds of problems?
    • The most productive kinds of thought are methods that lead us to formulating useful new kinds of descriptions
    • New ideas often have roots in older ones, adapted for new purposes.
  • The Body-Support Concept - The body represents those parts of a structure that serve as the direct instrument for reaching the goals and the support represents all the other features that merely serve that instrument.
    • To understand how something works, it helps to know how it can fail.
  • Means and Ends - Even when we simply put something on a table, we're likely to employ several descriptions at the same time - perhaps in different sections of the mind. The quality of our understanding depends upon how well we move between those different realms, discovering systematic cross-realm correspondences.
    • These correspondences are the roots of fruitful metaphors; they enable us to understand things we've never seen before. When something seems entirely new in one of our description-worlds, it may turn out that when translated to some other world it resembles something we already know.
  • Seeing Squares - We often self-impose assumptions that make our problems more difficult, and we can escape from this only by reformulating those problems in ways that give us more room.
    • Most of what we think we see comes from inside our brain; we respond not only to visual features, but also to our remembrances of things we've seen before and to our expectations of what we ought to see.
    • Human vision must somehow combine the information that comes from the outer world with the structures in our memories.
  • Brainstorming - Your brain is constantly preparing ways to reformulate ideas by building up connections between different kinds of descriptions. Then when you finally change your view to find another way to look at things, you can apply a lifetime of experience as easily as turning on a switch.
    • It may be rash to change yourself too much just to accommodate a single strange experience. To take every exception seriously is to risk the loss of general rules that previous experience has shown to work most frequently.
    • It isn't any accident that the things that we can always do are just the ones we should rarely do.
  • The Investment Principle - Our oldest ideas have unfair advantages over those that come later. The earlier we learn a skill, the more methods we can acquire for using it. Each new idea must then compete against the larger mass of skills the old ideas have accumulated.
    • We're almost always immersed in the short run. So the principles of investment and of exception make us reluctant to tamper with our well-established skills and uniframes lest we endanger all that we have built upon those old foundations.
    • Why do so many animals contain their brains inside their heads? Because this arrangement was inherited well over 300m years ago and it would be too costly and complicated to change now. DNA has scarcely changed a single bit in a billion years and even though it does not seem to be particularly efficient or reliable, we are stuck with it.
  • Parts and Holes - Why focus so sharply on the concept of a container? Because without that concept, we could scarcely understand the structure of the spatial world. And this is true also of psychological things, as a mental implement for envisioning and understanding other, more complicated structures. The idea of a set of all possible directions is one of the great coherent cross-realm correspondences that can be used in many different realms of thought.
  • The Power of Negative Thinking - The optimistic strategy makes sense when one sees several ways to go - and merely has to choose the best. The pessimistic strategy should be reserved for when one sees no way at all, when things seem really desperate.
  • The Interaction-Square - Is the simplest way to represent what happens when two causes interact.
    • The spatial agency in our Society of More is not really involved with space at all, but with interactions between agents like Tall and Thin, and an interaction-square provides a convenient way to represent all the possible combinations.
    • Only rarely, it seems, do people deal with more than two causes at a time; instead we either find ways to reformulate such situations or we accumulate disorderly societies of partially filled interaction-squares that cover only the most commonly encountered combinations.

15. Consciousness and Memory

  • Momentary Mental State - Consciousness does not concern the present, but the past: it has to do with how we think about the records of our recent thoughts.
    • Most agencies are there to learn to recognize events inside the brain. Only a small minority of our agents are connected directly to sensors in the outer world, like those that send signals from the eye or skin. And the agents that are engage in using and changing our most recent memories lie at the roots of consciousness.
    • We become less conscious of some things when we become more conscious of others because some resource is approaching some limitation - we have only a limited capacity to keep good records of our recent thoughts.
    • This kind of self-inspected probe is prone to change just what it's looking a. Would any process not become confused that alters what it's looking at?
  • Self-Examination - There is a common myth that what we view as consciousness is measurelessly deep and powerful - yet actually, we scarcely know a thing about what happens in the great computers of our brains.
  • Memory - I suspect that we never really remember very much about a particular experience. Instead, our various agencies selectively decide, unconsciously, to transfer only certain states into their long-term memories - perhaps because they have been classified as useful, dangerous, unusual, or significant in other respects. It would be of little use for us simply to maintain vast stores of unclassified memories if, every time we needed one, we had to search through all of them.
    • Instead, each of us must develop fruitful and effective ways to organize our memories - but how that's done is inaccessible to consciousness.
    • Short-term memories last only for seconds or minutes.
    • Long-term memories can persist for days or years or all one's life.
  • Memories of Memories - It's hard to distinguish memories from memories of memories. There's little evidence that any of our adult memories really go way back to infancy; what seem like early memories may be nothing more than reconstructions of our older thoughts
    • Memories from our first five years seem oddly isolated and probably involve incidents so significant that they probably occupied the child's mind repeatedly over a period of years. They are often described as seen though other, older eyes
    • The "amnesia of infancy" is probably an inevitable result of growing out of infancy. To remember is not merely to retrieve but also to recreate how your earlier mind reacted (by becoming an infant again). As you grow you have to sacrifice your earlier memories because they're written in an ancient script that your later selves can no longer read.
    • From every moment to the next, your mental state is shaped not only by signals from the outer world, but by agents activated by the memories these evoke. Only a part of your impression comes from agents activated directly by your vision; most of what your higher-level agencies experience comes from the memories those vision-agents activate.
    • It is only when a recognition involves substantial time and effort that we speak of "remembering".
    • Memories are processes that make some of our agents act in much the same ways they did at various times in the past.
  • The Immanence Illusion - Whenever you can answer a question without a noticeable delay, it seems as though that answer were already active in your mind.
    • Memories can't really bring things back from the past - they only reproduce some fragments of our former states of mind. Why do they feel so real? Because real-time experience is just as indirect! The closest we can come to apprehending the world, in any case, is through the descriptions our agents make.
    • Perceptions can evoke our memories so quickly that we can't distinguish what we've seen from what we've been led to recollect.
    • The experience of seeing things has a relatively rigid character, in contrast to the experience of imagining things. Every change that the rest of your mind tries to impose upon your vision-agencies is resisted and usually reversed. Perhaps this is what we identify with vividness or objectivity.
    • Sometimes our sense of objectivity can get reversed - as when an attitude or memory becomes more stable and persistent than what it represents, particularly our attitudes toward things we love or loathe are often much less changeable than those things themselves - particularly in the case of other people's personalities. Here, our private memories can be more rigid than reality.
  • Many Kinds of Memory - A brain has no single, common memory system. Instead, each part of the brain has several types of memory-agencies that work in somewhat different ways, to suit particular purposes.
    • Most likely, some types of memory mechanisms retain the records of sensations only for seconds. We use others to adopt habits, goals, and styles that we hold only for days or weeks. And we make personal attachments that endure through many months or years. Yet suddenly from time to time, we'll modify some memories that seemed, till then, quite permanent.
  • Memory Rearrangements - Because each memory-unit must wait until the previous step is finished, the timing of each script step may have to depend on various condition sensors. But these processes also need ways to interrupt themselves while they call on other agencies or memories for help, just like we may have to do when dealing with things in the outside world.
  • Anatomy of Memory - We'll assume that every substantial agency has several "micro-memory units," each of which is a sort of temporary K-line that can quickly store or restore the states of the micro-memories themselves. When any of these temporary memory-units are reused, the information that we stored in them is erased - unless it has somehow been transferred into more permanent or long-term memory-systems. It seems that in human brains, the processes that transfer information into long-term memory are very slow and so most temporary memories are permanently lost.
  • Interruption and Recovery - Why do we get confused when we're interrupted? Because then we have to keep our place in several processes at once. Yet, psychologically, we're unaware that ordinary thinking is so complicated - the processes are too many levels away from those we use to work the short-term memories involved with language and consciousness.
  • Losing Track - Why do visual processes so rarely encounter difficulties of interruption? they can support more simultaneously operating processed that our language-systems can, so there are fewer interruptions, and they can choose for themselves the sequence in which they attend to details, whereas language-agencies are controlled by the person who is speaking.
    • It takes many years to learn to use those memory-systems well.
  • The Recursion Principle - When a problem splits into smaller parts, then unless one can apply the mind's full power to each subjob, one's intellect will get dispersed and leave less cleverness for each new task.
    • The best way to solve a hard problem is to break it into several simpler ones, and break those into even simpler ones, but then we face the problem of mental fragmentation.
    • We can also work on the various parts of a problem in serial order, one after another, using the same agency over and over again, but this takes more time.
    • Our short-term memories must work too fast to have any time for consciousness.

16. Emotion

  • Emotion - The use of fantasies, emotional or not, is indispensable for every complicated problem-solving process. We always have to deal with nonexistent scenes, because only when a mind can change the ways things appear to be can it really start to think of how to change the way things are.
    • Too much commitment leads to doing only one single thing; too little concern produces aimless wandering.
  • Cross-Exclusion - Each member of a group of agents is wired to send "inhibitory" signals to all the other agents of that group. This makes them competitors (OR operator). When any agent of such a group is aroused, its signals tend to inhibit the others.
  • Avalanche Effects - The most active agent can quickly "lock out " all the others. So we need additional control mechanisms, which are common across all biological systems
    • Conservation - Force all activities to depend upon some substance or other kind of quantity of which only a certain amount is available
    • Negative Feedback - Supply a "summary" device that estimates the total activity in the agency and then broadcasts to that agency an "inhibitory" signal whose strength is in proportion to that total. This can damp down incipient avalanches.
    • Censors and Suppressors - While conservatism and feedback schemes tend to be indiscriminate, these are more sensitive and versatile in learning to recognize - and then to avoid - specific patterns of activity that have led to trouble in the past
    • All human communities seem to work out policies for how their members ought to think, in forms that are thought of as common sense or as law, religion, or philosophy.
  • Motivation -
  • Exploitation - Each part of the mind exploits the rest, not knowing how the other parts work but ony what they seem to do.
    • One needs a process that sometimes works before one can proceed to improve it.
  • Stimulus vs Simulus - One agency can exploit another by providing a stimulus to activate it. Perhaps the simplest way would be to force the highest-level agents into whichever states would result from seeing a certain scene. A simulus could activate some suitable K-lines to simulate the higher-level effects of a true stimulus.
  • Infant Emotions - In contrast to the complex mixtures of expressions that adults show, young children seem usually to be in one or another well-defined state of activity - contentment, hunger, sleepiness, play, affection, etc. Older children show less sudden mood changes, and their expressions suggest that more different things are happening at once. Our minds may thus originate as sets of relatively simple, separate need machines.
    • To help their offspring grow, most animals evolve two matching schemes. Babies have intense, focused irresistible cries to arouse parents, who contain baby-watching systems with high priority. These systems could be wired to the remnants of our own infantile needs, so that we react to the cries with urgency and sympathy.
  • Adult Emotions - Our earliest emotions are built-in processes in which proto-specialists control what happens in our brains. Soon we learn to overrule those schemes, as our surroundings teach us what we ought to feel. Parents, teachers, friends, and finally our self-ideals impose upon us new rules for ho to use the remnants of those early states: they teach us how and when to feel and show each kind of emotion sign.
    • By the time we're adults, these systems have become too complicated to understand - we've passed through so many stages of development and our minds have been rebuilt too many times to remember or understand much of how it felt to be an infant.
    • What are emotions anyway, and what are all the other things we label moods, feelings, passions, needs, or sensibilities? We find it hard to agree on the meanings of words like these, presumably because few of them actually correspond to clearly distinct mental processes. Instead, when we learn such words, we each attach to them variously different and personal accumulations of conceptions in our minds.
    • Commonsense psychology has not even reached a consensus on which emotions exist.

17. Development

  • Sequences of Teaching-Selves - Our sense of unity is acquired over many stages of development. Each stage is superceded by a new stage that is built on top of it and goes beyond the sophistication and integration of it.
    • The puzzle principle - It is usually easier to recognize a solution to a problem than to discover a solution.
    • One's present personality cannot share many of the thought of all one's older personalities - and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self - a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help.
  • Attachment-Learning - There are particular types of learning that can only proceed in the presence of the particular individuals to whom one has become attached.
    • In ordinary forms of failure or success signals, the learner modifies the methods used to reach the goal.
    • In fear-provoking situations, the learner may modify the description of the situation itself.
    • In attachment-related failure or reward signals, the learner modifies which goals are considered worthy of pursuit.
  • Attachment Simplifies - Attachment related signals seem to work directly on the goals themselves - and thus can modify our personalities. Attachments teach us ends, not means - and thus impose on us our parent's dreams.
    • Most higher animals have evolved instinctive bonding mechanisms that keep the youngsters close to the parents. Human infants, too, are born with tendencies to form special attachments
    • Attachments keep children safe, but also force children to acquire values, goals, and ideals from particular older individuals.
    • Though a child can learn about ordinary causes and effects, only through modeling adult behavior can they construct a coherent system of values. The construction of a "civilized personality" is too complicated for a single individual.
  • Functional Autonomy - When pursuing any sufficiently complicated problem, the subgoals that engage our attentions can become both increasingly more ambitious and increasingly detached from the original problem.
    • Virtually any problem will be easier to solve the more one learns about the context world in which that problem occurs. No matter what one's problem is, provided that it's hard enough, one always gains from learning better ways to learn.
    • Our most abstract investigations can be seen as having origins in finding means to ordinary ends. In the end, our initial goals matter scarcely at all, because no matter what our original objectives, we can gain more by becoming better able to predict and control our world. Knowledge is power.
  • Developmental Stages - Why can't we grow by steady, smooth development? It's always dangerous to change a system that already works, and you should never give control to a new system until it is fully tested. So new systems are developed internally, tested, and only then released.
  • Prerequisites for Growth - To build a good Society-of-More, it simply would not be practical for a child to introduce Appearance and History until some lower-level agents such as Tall, Thin, No Loss, and Reversible had become available.
    • We can never be sure of what a skill's prerequisites must be - and this will always complicate psychology.
    • It is hard enough to analyze what people do, but it is almost impossible to recognize the things they never do.
  • Genetic Timetables - Having these for stages of development is possible but may not be flexible enough. Maybe a combination of the investment principle (where a skill surpasses its competitors, becomes more and more useful and then dominates the scene) and the exception principle (where the skill becomes so useful to other agencies that changing it would become too disruptive) suggests another way.
    • Once a scheme persists for long enough it becomes "too big to fail" and since it is too hard to change, it is time to build a replacement. We need revolution not evolution.
  • Attachment-Images - We aren't born with built-in Selves, but we are, in the main, surrounded by caretakers who we can model ourselves on. This is the way that values and goals of a culture pass from one generation to the next.
    • Feelings of virtuousness and shame guide us in constructing this self.
    • So we are dominated by parent's goals and dreams, but at least we are not being forced to obey mere unlearned, built-in instinct goals.
  • Different Spans of Memories - Parent-to-child and child-to-parent bonds must be based on certain types of memory that are rapidly-formed and particularly slow to change.
    • See also friendship, infatuations, and mourning.
  • Intellectual Trauma - Intellectual development can depend upon attachments to other persons and can have buried fears and dreads.
    • In the social world, other people can inform us about our violations of taboos, but in the realm of the intellect, we can often detect our own deficiencies.
  • Intellectual Ideals - We make intellectual attachments and want to think the way certain other people do, from parents, teachers, and friends, to writers and even legendary heroes who never existed. We depend as much on these images or how we ought to think as we do on those of how we ought to feel.
    • Human thought is not baed on any single and uniform kind of "logic", but upon myriad processes, scripts, stereotypes, critics and censors, analogies and metaphors.
    • At every step, the choices we make depend on what we have become. our sciences, arts, and moral skills do not originate from detached ideals of truth, beauty, or virtue but stem partly from our endeavors to placate or please the images established in earlier years. Our adult dispositions thus evolve from impulses so infantile that we would surely censure them, if they were not by now transformed, disguised, or - as Freud said - "sublimated".

18. Reasoning

  • Must Machines Be Logical? - When do we actually use logic in real life? We use it to simplify and summarize our thoughts. We use it to explain arguments to other people and to persuade them that those arguments are right. We use it to formulate our own ideas. But I doubt that we often use logic actually to solve problems or to "get" new ideas. Instead, we formulate our arguments and conclusions in logical terms after we have constructed or discovered them in other ways; only then do we use verbal and other kinds of formal reasoning to "clean things up," to separate the essential parts from the spaghetti-like tangles of thoughts and ideas in which they first occurred.
    • Logic no more explains how we think than grammar explains how we speak; both can tell us whether our sentences are properly formed, but they cannot tell us which sentences to make. Without an intimate connection between our knowledge and our intentions, logic leads to madness, not intelligence. A logical system without a goal will merely generate an endless host of pointless truths.
  • Chains of Reasoning - For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles - with virtually no success. Many thinkers have assumed that logical necessity lies at the heart of our reasoning. but for the purposes of psychology, we'd do better to set aside the dubious idea of faultless deduction and try, instead, to understand how people actually deal with what is usual or typical. To do this, we often think in terms of causes, similarities, and dependencies. What do all these forms of thinking share? They all use different ways to make chains.
  • Chaining - Seems to permeate not only how we reason, but how we think of structures in space and time. Why do chains apply so well to insubstantial "lines of thought"? It is because there's such a good analogy between how chains can break and how reasoning can fail.
  • Logical Chains - Commonsense reasoning differs from "logical" reasoning. When an ordinary argument seems weak, we may be able to support it with more evidence. But there is no way for a link inside a logic chain to use additional support; if it's not quite right, then it's absolutely wrong.
    • Logic rarely helps us get a new idea, but it often helps us to detect the weaknesses in old ideas. Sometimes it also helps us clarify our thoughts by refining messy networks into simpler chains. Once we find a way to solve a certain problem, logical analysis can help us find the most essential steps. Then it becomes easier to explain what we've discovered to other people - and also we often benefit from explaining our ideas to ourselves. This is because, more often than not, instead of explaining what we actually did, we come up with a new formulation. Paradoxically, the moments in which we think we're being logical and methodical can be just the times at which we're most creative and original.
  • Strong Arguments - What has "strength" to do with reasoning? In logic, arguments are simply either right or wrong, since there is not the slightest room for matters of degree. But in real life, few arguments are ever absolutely sure, so we simply have to learn how various forms of reasoning are likely to go wrong. Then we can use different methods to make our chains of reasoning harder to break.
    • A chain can break with any single injury, but a parallel bundle cannot fail unless every one of its links has been broken.
    • Each serial connection makes a structure weaker, while each parallel connection makes it stronger.
  • Magnitude from Multitude - We rarely need to know that anything is absolutely wrong or right; instead, we only want to choose the best of some alternatives.
    • Strength from Magnitude - When two forces work together, they add to form a single larger force. But when two forces oppose each other directly, their strengths subtract.
    • Strength from Multitude - The more reasons we can find in favor of a particular decision, the more confidence we can have in it. If some of those reasons turn out to ve wrong, other reasons may still remain.
  • What is a Number? - The closest we can come to agreeing on meanings is in mathematics, when we talk of things like "three" and "five". But even something as impersonal as "five" never stands isolated in a person's mind but becomes part of a huge network.
    • Each number meaning works in different problem worlds. To ask which meaning is correct - to count, match, or put into groups - is foolishness: each method helps the others, and all of them together make a mass of skills that grow in power and efficiency. The really useful meaning are not the flimsy logic chains of definitions, but the much harder-to-express networks of ways to remember, compare, and change things.
  • Mathematics Made Hard - As scientists, we like to make our theories as delicate and fragile as possible. We like to arrange things so that if the slightest thing goes wrong, everything will collapse at once!
    • The ordinary goals of ordinary citizens are not the same as those of mathematicians and philosophers - who like to put things into form with as few connections as possible. For children know from everyday experience that the more cross-connected their common-sense ideas are, the more useful they're likely to be.
  • Robustness and Recovery - How do things keep functioning while vital parts are modified - or even lost?
    • Duplication - Functions can be embodied in several duplicated agents, in different places so that is one is disabled, another can take over. Many regions of the mind do have several duplicates.
    • Self-Repair - In the brain, it simply wouldn't help to replace individual brain agents - unless the same healing process could also restore all the learned connections among those agents.
    • Distributed Processes - Spread out over a range of locations
    • Accumulation - Each agent tends to accumulate a family of subagents that can accomplish that agent's goals in several ways, so that if some become impaired, others can take over. Accumulation - the simplest form of learning provides both robustness and versatility.

19. Words and Ideas

  • The Roots of Intention - Language builds things in our minds. Yet words themselves can't be the substance of our thoughts. They have no meanings by themselves; they're only special sorts of marks or sounds. If we're to understand how language works, we must discard the usual view that words denote or represent, or designate; instead, their function is control: each word makes various agents change what various agents do. If we want to understand how language works, we must never forget that our thinking-in-words reveals only a fragment of the mind's activity.
    • The words we think seem to hover in some insubstantial interface wherein we understand neither the origins of the symbol-signs that seem to express our desires nor the destinations wherein they lead to actions and accomplishments. This is why words and images seem so magical: they work without our knowing how or why. At one moment a word can seem enormously meaningful; at the next moment it can seem no more than a sequence of sounds. And this is as it should be. It is the underlying emptiness of words that gives them their potential versatility. The less there is in a treasure chest, the more you'll be able to put in it.
  • The Language Agency - As far as language can tell, no sooner do we hear a phrase than all its meanings spring to min - yet we have no conscious sense of how those words produce their effects. Consciousness does not reveal how language works. Language is only a part of thought. The language agency can exploit itself as though it were just another agency.
  • Words and Ideas - How are words involved with mental processes and how does language enable people to communicate?
    • Polynemes - Are kinds of K-lines. They send the same, simple signal to many different agencies and each of those agencies must learn, for itself, what to do when it receives that signal. When you hear the word "apple", a certain polyneme is aroused, and the signal from this polyneme will put your Color agency into a state that represents redness, your Shape agency into a state that represents roundness, and so forth. The polyneme for "apple" doesn't know anything about apples, colors, shapes, or anything else - it is merely a switch that turns on processes in other agencies, each of which has learned to respond in its own way.
    • Isonomes - Control a short term memory in each of many agencies. A word like "it" excites an isonome whose signal has no particular significance by itself, but controls what various agencies do with certain recent memories.
  • Objects and Properties - It's usually impossible to perfectly define a word because you cannot capture everything you mean in just a phrase; an apple means a thousand things. However, you can usually say some of what you mean by making list of properties. What is a property? We like the kinds of properties that do not change capriciously and the most useful sets of properties are those whose members do not interact too much.
    • This explains the universal popularity of that particular combination of properties: size, color, shape, and substance, each of which we represent in separate agencies. Then those properties can simultaneously arouse separate partial states of mind at once, in several divisions of the mind and a single word can activate many different kinds of thoughts at once;
  • Polynemes - To understand a polyneme, each agency must learn its own specific and appropriate response. Each agency must have its private dictionary or memory bank to tell it how to respond to every polyneme.
  • Recognizers - How do we recognize things? The simplest way is to verify that a thing has certain properties. We don't need to find every feature, but should be able to weigh the evidence as to whether an apple or a chair is present.
  • Weighing Evidence - All feature-weighing machines have serious limitations because, although they can measure the presence or absence of various features, they cannot take into account enough of the relations among those features.
  • Generalizing - We're always learning from experience by seeing some examples and then applying them to situations that we've never seen before. We humans do not learn in accord with any fixed and constant set of principles; instead, we accumulate societies of learning-schemes that differ both in quality and kind.
    • Hofstadter: "Making variations on a them is the crux of creativity. But it is not some magical mysterious process that occurs when two indivisible concepts collide; it is a consequence of the divisibility of concepts into already significant subconceptual elements."
  • Recognizing Thoughts - Inside the brain, there is no big difference between seeing an apple and hearing the word "apple". In neither case is there a real apple in the brain. In both cases, some part of the mind must recognize what's happening in certain other parts of mind. Recognizers can identify a certain combination of ideas whether they arise from physical or mental objects, and then trigger the appropriate polyneme "apple".
  • Closing the Ring - If you start with enough clues to arouse one of your apple-names, it will automatically arouse memories of the other properties and qualities of apples and create a more complete impression, "simulus" or hallucination of the experience of seeing, feeling, and even of eating an apple. This way, a simple loop machine can reconstruct a larger whole from clues about only certain of its parts!
    • To think effectively, we often have to turn aside from certainty - to take some chance of being wrong. Our memory systems are powerful because they're not constrained to be perfect!

20. Context and Ambiguity

  • Ambiguity - Our states of mind are usually subject to change. The properties of physical things tend to persist when their contexts are changed - but the significance of a though, idea, or partial state of mind depends upon which other thoughts are active at the time and upon what eventually emerges from the conflicts and negotiations among one's agencies. It is an illusion to assume a clear and absolute distinction between expressing and thinking, since expressing is itself an active process that involves simplifying and reconstituting a mental state by detaching it from the more diffuse and variable parts of its context.
    • Thoughts themselves are ambiguous!
    • We can tolerate the ambiguity of words because we are already so competent at coping with the ambiguity of thoughts.
  • Negotiating Ambiguity - The trouble is that the word "star" is linked to different polynemes for a celestial body, a theatrical celebrity, or an object with a certain shape. The momentary confusion comes because the word "astronomer" gives us an initial bias toward the celestial sense of "star". But that inhuman meaning causes conflict in our marriage-agent, and this soon leads to another more consistent interpretation.
    • As the polynemes for deer and gun gain strength, they will weaken and suppress the competing nemes for money and for wagering - and that will weaken, in turn, the other polynemes that support the alternative context of making bets. The end effect of this will be almost instantaneous. In only a few cycles of the meaning ring, the agents associated with deer and gun will completely suppress their competitors.
  • Visual Ambiguity - Ambiguities are just as common in vision, too. What we "see" does not depend only on what reaches our eyes from the outside world. The manner in which we interpret those stimuli depends to a large extent on what is already taking place inside our agencies.
  • Locking-In and Weeding-Out - At every moment a person's mind is already involved with some context in which many agents are actively aroused. Because of this, as each new word arouses different polynemes, these will compete to change the states of those agents. Some of those changes will gain support as certain combinations of agents reinforce one another. Others that lose support and are left to stand alone will tend to weaken, and most ambiguities will thus be weeded out. In a few cycles, the entire system will firmly "lock in" on one meaning-sense for each word and firmly suppress the rest.
  • Micronemes - Every situation or condition we experience is influences or, so to speak, colored, by thousands of contextual shades and hues, just as looking through a tinted glass has faint effect on everything we see.
    • Some of these conditions and relationships may correspond to language-words, but for most of them we have no words, just as we have no expressions for most flavors and aromas, gestures and intonations, attitudes and dispositions. I'll call them micronemes.
    • While each such effect may be relatively small, the effects of activating many micronemes will usually combine to establish a context within which most words are understood unambiguously.
    • Even modest families of micronemes could span vast ranges of contexts. 40 could specify a trillion different contexts, and we surely have thousands and perhaps millions.
  • The Nemeic Spiral - Our polynemes and micronemes grow into great branching networks that reach every level of every agency. They approximate the general form of a hierarchy, but one that is riddled with shortcuts, cross-connections, and exceptions. No one could ever comprehend all the details of the connections that develop inside a single human individual; that would amount to grasping how all that person's thoughts and inclinations interact.
  • Connections - To speak and understand a language well, an ordinary person must learn thousands of words. To learn the proper use of a single word must involve great numbers of connections between the agents for that word and other agents.
  • Connection Lines - We need efficient ways to make these connections.
  • Distributed Memory - I suspect that when we understand the brain, we'll discover that small groups of connection lines do indeed have local significance - because they will turn out to be the most important agents of nearby levels. The connection lines themselves will constitute our micronemes.

21. Trans-Frames

  • The Pronouns of the Mind - Pronouns do not signify objects or words: instead, they represent conceptions, ideas, or activities that the speaker assumes are going on inside the listener's mind. Whenever we talk or think, we use pronoun-like devices to exploit whatever mental activities have already been aroused, to interlink the thoughts already active in the mind. To do this, though, we need to have machinery we can use a temporary "handles" for taking hold of, and moving around, those active fragments of mental states. To emphasize the analogy with the pronouns of our languages, I'll call such handles "pronomes".
  • Pronomes - Certain concerns and roles seem so important that every language has developed speak word-forms or grammatical constructions for them - Subjects, Verbs, Objects, Prepositions.
    • Representing both space and time in similar ways lets us apply the selfsame reasoning skills to both of them.
  • Trans-Frames - At their simples, show an Origin, a Trajectory or Difference, and a Destination, and can be thought of in chains. Once you learn efficient chain-manipulating skills, you can apply them to many different kinds of situations and actions. Constructing mental chains seems as easy as stringing beads - you just replace each Trans-Frame's Destination with the next one's Origin.
  • Trans-Frame Pronomes - Include Origin, Difference or Trajectory, and Destination, but can also include Cause, Obstacle, Effect, Vechicle, Instrument, Actor, Object, Time, Place, Action, Goal, Method, etc.
  • Generalizing with Pronomes - The first few times you try to do something new, you must experiment to find which agents to activate, and at what times, and for how long. Later, you can prepare a script that will do the job more quickly and easily by accumulating memories of which agent-activations were successful, together with memories of which polynemes were assigned to various pronomes at those moments.
  • Attention - How does memory-control begin? Perhaps our infants first acquire control over a single pronome, which gives them the ability to keep in mind a "temporary polyneme". This amounts to being able to maintain only a single "object of attention", let's call it IT. New even the ability to keep track of a single IT requires the development of certain skills of memory-control, for it takes the normal infant several months to become able to tolerate even a small interruption without losing its previous focus of interest.
    • In later life, we become more able to maintain several ITs at once. This enables us to construct comparisons, predictions, and imaginary plans, and to begin to construct explanations in terms of chains of causes and reasons.

22. Expression

  • Pronomes and Polynemes - Each pronome must be assigned to different things at different times, and only for long enough to complete the task of the moment. A pronome is a type of short-term memory.
    • Each pronome is simply a temporary K-line, where a pronome's connections are temporary rather than permanent. We can assign a pronome by temporarily connecting it to whichever currently active agents it reaches. Then, when we activate that pronome again, those same agents will be aroused. To make the Origin pronome represent an apple, first activate an apple-neme; this will arouse certain agents. Next, quickly assign the Origin pronome. Those agents will then become attached to that pronome and presumably remain attached until the pronome is reassiged.
    • Polynemes are permanent K-lines. They are long-term memories.
    • Pronomes are temporary K-lines. They are short term memories.
  • Isonomes - An isonome has a uniform sort of effect on many agencies.
    • An isonome has a simolar built-in effect on each of its recipients. It thus applies the same idea to many different things at once.
    • A polyneme has different, learned effects on each of its recipients. It thus connects the same thing to many different ideas.
    • Both isonomes and polynemes are involved with memories, but polynemes are essentially the memories themselves, while isonomes control how memories are used. Pronomes are a particular type of isonome; there must also be "interruption isonomes" that work similarly but manage memories on larger scales - for example, for storing away the several pronome memories of an entire Trans-frame all at once.
    • The power of polynemes stems from how they learn to arouse many different processes at once, while isonomes draw their power from exploiting abilities that are already common to many agencies.
  • De-Specializing - None of our many chaining tricks would have much use if each were permanently tied to one specific polyneme like "cup" or "car. However, once we learn to build our process scripts with isonomes, each can be applied to many kinds of reasoning
    • What we call generalizing is not any single process of concept, but a functional term for the huge societies of different methods we use to extend the powers of our skills. No single policy will work for all domains of thought, and each refinement of technique will affect the quality of the generalizations we make.
    • Converting polynemes to isonomes may be a potentially powerful skill, but it must be adapted to different realms. Once we accumulate enough examples of how a new script fails and succeeds in several situations, we can try to build a uniframe to embody good constraints. But no matter which policy we adopt, we must always expect some exceptions.
    • Premature generalizations could lead to such large accumulations of constraints, censors, and exceptions that it would be better to retain the original polynemes.
  • Learning and Teaching - Why are some children better than others at transfer of learning from one domain to another? Some children learn to represent knowledge in versatile ways, others end up with accumulations of inflexible, single-purpose procedures or with almost useless generalities.
  • Inference - Over the years, children improve their abilities to decide when two different structures are similar enough to justify making chain-links. This often requires us to recall and apply other types of knowledge at appropriate level-bands of detail.
    • By learning to manipulate our isonomes, we become able to combine mental representations into structures that resemble bridges, chains, and towers. Our language-agencies learn to express these in the form of compound sentences, by using conjunctive grammar wors like and, because, or or. But language is not the only realm in which we learn to conceptualize - that is to treat our mental processes almost as though they were object-things.
  • Expression - Language lets us treat our thoughts as though they were much like ordinary things. We speak as though ideas resemble building-blocks that one can find and grasp.
    • Our ability to treat ideas as though they were objects goes together with our abilities to reuse our brain-machinery over and over again. Whenever an agency becomes overburdened by a large and complicated structure, we may be able to treat that structure as a simple, single unit by thing-ifying - or conceptualizing it. Then, once we replace a larger structure by representing it with a compact symbol-sign, that overloaded agency may now be able to continue its work. This way, we can build grand structures of ideas.
    • There's probably little difference between a physical object and an idea as they are represented in the mind.
    • No conception or idea could have much use unless it could remain unchanged - and stay in some kind of mental place - for long enough for us to find it when we need it. Nor could we ever achieve a goal unless it could persist for long enough. No mind can work without some stable states or memories.
  • Causes and Clauses - Our brains appear to make us seek to represent dependencies. Whatever happens, where or when, we're prone to wonder who or what's responsible. This leads us to discover explanations that we might not otherwise imagine, and that helps us predict and control not only what happens in the world, but also what happens in our minds.
  • If we imagine things and causes that do not exist then we'll invent false gods and superstitions and see their hand in every chance coincidence.
  • Perhaps the word "I" reflects the selfsame tendency where we're compelled to find some cause that causes everything we do.
  • Interruptions - English tends to use certain "wh" words like "which" and "who" to interrupt a listener's language-agency and cause its short-term memories to temporarily store away some of their present pronome assignments. This provides the language-agency with more capacity to understand the interrupting phrase.
  • Pronouns and References - At each point in a dialogue, both parties are already involved with various concerns and desires. These establish contexts in which each new word, description, or representation, however ambiguous, gets merges with whichever short-term memory best matches it.
    • Our language-agencies must dispose of each phrase as soon as possible, so that they can apply their full capacities to deal with what comes afterward. If something in the conversation does not match anything that came before, the listener must activate a new memory-unit. This tends to slow the process down, because it consumes our limited supplies of short-term memory and makes subsequent matching more difficult. If the listener cannot make suitable assignments quickly enough, the conversation will seem incoherent and communication will break down.
    • Eloquent speakers avoid this by designing each new expression to be easily attached to structures already active in the listener; otherwise the listener is entitled to complain that the language isn't clear.
  • Verbal Expression - To talk, you must engage a vast array of agencies to build new structures in another person's mind. But how do you know just way to say to affect that other person's agencies.
    • If Mary want s to tell Jack something, there is a certain structure p somewhere inside the network of Mary's agencies and her language-agency must construct a similar structure inside Jack's mind. To do this, Mary will need to speak words that will activate appropriate activities inside Jack's agencies, then correctly link them together.
    • Learning these arts takes a long time: most children need a decade or more to complete their language-systems and many keep learning, throughout their lives, to sense new sorts of discrepancies and discover ways to express them.
  • Creative Expression - Whether or not what you meant to say actually existed before you spoke, your language-agencies are likely either to reformulate what did exist or create something new and different from anything you had before.
    • Whenever you try to express with words any complicated mental state, you're forces to oversimplify - and that can cause both loss and gain.
    • On the losing side, no word description of a mental state can ever be complete; some nuances are always lost.
    • But when you're forced to separate the essences from accidents, you gain the opportunity to make reformulations. Then, since your language-agency knows so little about the actual state of those other agencies, it must answer by making theories about them, and these may well leave you in a state that is simpler, clearer, and better suited to solving your problem.
    • When we try to explain what we think we know, we're likely to end up with something new
    • This is what we call culture - the conceptual treasures our communities accumulate through history.

23. Comparisons

  • A World of Differences - Much of ordinary thought is based on recognizing differences. This is because it is generally useless to do anything that has no discernible effect. When we talk about cause and effect, we're referring to imaginary links that connect the differences we sense. What are goals but ways in which we represent the kinds of changes we might like to make.
    • The ability to consider differences between differences is important because it lies at the heart of our abilities to solve new problems. This is because these second-order differences are what we use to remind ourselves of other problems we already know how to solve. sometimes this is called reasoning by analogy and is considered to be an exotic or unusual way to solve problems. But in my view, it's our most ordinary way of doing things.
  • Differences and Duplicates - The duplication problem: The states of two different agencies cannot be compared unless those agencies themselves are virtually identical.
  • Time Blinking - Since most agents can be made to serve as difference-agents, we can compare two descriptions simply by presenting them to the same agency at different times. This is easily done if that agency is equipped with a pair of high-speed, temporary K-line memories. Then we need only load the two descriptions into those memories and compare them by activating first one and then the other.
    • The method of time blinking can also be used to simplify our difference-engine scheme for composing verbal expressions, since now the speaker can maintain both p and q inside the selfsame agency. If not for this, each speaker would need what would amount to a duplicate society of mind in order to simulate the listener's state.
  • The Meanings of More - When we hear the word "more" we become disposed to make comparisons.
    • As life proceeds, each person's concept of More grows more and more elaborate. When it comes to notions like more similar, more interesting, or more difficult, there seems not limit to the complexity of what a word like more can represent.
  • Foreign Accents - Most human languages use less than a hundred phonemes. If parents were inclined and able to learn to speak the ways their children do, those children would lost both incentive and opportunity to learn to speak like adults, and - if every child acquired a different set of language sounds - no common, public language would ever have evolved in the first place.

24. Frames

  • The Speed of Thought - Sight is intertwined with memory. When face to face with someone you've just met you seem to react almost instantly - but not as much to what you see as to what that sight reminds you of. The moment you sense the presence of a person, a whole world of assumptions are aroused that are usually true about people in general. At the same time, certain superficial cues remind you of particular people you've already met. Unconsciously, then, you will assume that this stranger must also resemble them, not only in appearance but in other traits as well.
    • No amount of self-discipline can keep those superficial similarities from provoking assumptions that may then affect your judgments and decisions. Wehn we disapprove of this, we complain about stereotypes - and when we sympathize with it, we speak of sensitivity and empathy.
    • It's much the same with language, too. If someone said, "It's raining frogs," you mind will swiftly fill with thoughts to examine this claim.
    • Each perceptual experience activates some structures that we'll call frames - structures we've acquired in the course of previous experience.
    • We all remember millions of frames, each representing some stereotyped situations like meeting a certain kind of person, being in a certain kind of room, or attending a certain kind of party.
  • Frames of Mind - A frame is a sort of skeleton, somewhat like an application form with many blanks or slots to be filled. We'll call these blanks its terminals; we use them as connection points to which we can attach other kinds of information.
    • Virtually any kind of agent can be attached to a frame terminal. It can be a <k-line, polyneme, isonome, memory-control script, or, best of all, another frame.
    • Default assumptions fill our frames to represent what's typical. They help us represent our previous experience. We use them for reasoning, recognizing, generalizing, predicting what may happen next, and knowing what we ought to try when expectations aren't met. Our frames affect our every thought and everything we do.
  • How Trans-Frames Work - When a frame-agent is activated - either by seeing, hearing, or imagining something - this supplies each of its AND-agents with an input. The second input is provided by some pronome which can thereby activate whichever agent or frame is presently assigned to that terminal. If several pronomes are active at the same time, all the corresponding agents will be activated too. When the frame above is active, the pronome for Origin will activate the K-line for Boston, and the pronome for Vehicle will activate the K-line for car.
  • Default Assumptions - Unless we make assumptions, the world would simply make no sense. It would be as useless to perceive how things "actually look" as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned TV screens.
    • What really matters is being able to see what things look like. This is why our brains need special machinery for representing what we see in terms of distinct objects.
    • Proust: "Each reader reads only what is already inside himself. A book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to let the reader discover in himself what he would not have found without the aid of the book.
  • Nonverbal Reasoning - Logical thinking is so much simpler - and less effective than common-sense thinking. Actually, what appears to be a matter of logic is usually not logical at all and frequently turns out to be wrong.
    • To reason well, our memory-control agencies must learn to move our memories around as though those memories were building-blocks. Conceivably, those agencies have to learn such skills before we can learn to build with blocks in the outside world of object-things.
  • Direction Nemes - If you were walking through a circular tube, you could scarcely keep from thinking in terms of bottom and top and sides - however vaguely their boundaries are defined. Without a way to represent the scene in terms of familiar parts, you'd have no well-established thinking skills to apply to it.
  • Picture Frames - Whenever we see a thing so utterly new that it resembles nothing we've ever seen before, this means that none of our prelearned frames will fit it very well. But we can almost always use a less specific frame that fits most any room at all. The trick will be to make all our frames for different rooms share the same terminals, so that when we interchange those frames, the information stored in them remains.
  • How Picture-Frames Work - Your eyes move in various directions, controlled in some way by direction-nemes. No suppose that every time you move your eyes, the same direction-nemes also activate the K-lines attached to the corresponding terminals of a certain vision-frame. Suppose also that those K-lines are ready to form new memories. Then each time you look in a different direction, your vision-system will describe what you see - and the corresponding K-line will record what you see when you look in that direction.
    • If, at a later date, that same frame is activated by memory than, as any of your agencies conceives of looking in a certain direction, the thought itself will involve the activation of the corresponding direction-neme: then, before you have a chance to think of anything else, the corresponding K-line will be aroused
    • Whichever way your mind's eye looks, you'll seem to see the corresponding aspect of the scene. You will experience an almost perfect "simulus" of being there!
  • Recognizers and Memorizers - We'll assume that every frame is activated by some set of recognizers, types of agent that, in a sense, are the opposite of K-lines, since instead of arousing a certain state of mind, they have to recognize when a certain state of mind occurs.
    • The recognizers of a frame are very much like the terminals of a frame, except that the connections to the terminals are reversed.
    • This suggests that not only frames but agencies in general might be organized in the form of agents sandwiched between recognizers and memorizers.

25. Frame-Arrays

  • One Frame at a Time - Our agencies can tolerate just one interpretation at a time. Our vision-systems are born equipped, on each of several different levels, with some sort of "locking-in" machinery that at every moment permits each part, at each level, to be assigned to one and only one whole at the next level. In every region of the picture, the frames must compete with one another to account for each feature.
  • Frame Arrays - Are groups of frames that share the same terminals. When you represent a thing's details with a frame-array, you can continue to move around yet keep in mind all that you've observed from those different viewpoints, even though you've never seen them all at once. This gives the wonderful ability to conceive of all of an object's different views as aspects of a single thing.
    • First you try to match what you see to the frame-arrays in the memories you have accumulated and refined over periods of may years. How do they originate? Presumably this pattern is built into the architecture of major sections of the brain. But although the pattern is built-in, developing the skills for using it involves each child in more than a decade of predestined learning.
  • The Stationary World - Our frame arrays store what we learn about the world at terminals that stay unchanged when we move our heads and bodies around. When you activate your move east direction-neme in order to make your body move in that direction, the same signal will also make this frame-array replace the middle frame with the one to its left. This will compensate for your change of viewpoint and determine what you "expect" to see - and the scene will appear to remain stationary!
  • The Sense of Continuity - Existence seems continuous to us not because we continually experience what is happening in the present, but because we hold to our memories of how things were in the recent past. Without those short-term memories, all would seem entirely new at every instant, and we would have no sense at all of continuity or, for that matter, of existence.
    • The power of consciousness comes not from ceaseless change of state, but from having enough stability to discern significant changes in our surroundings. To "notice" change requires the ability to resist it. In order to sense what persists through time, one must be able to examine and compare descriptions from the recent past. We notice change in spite of change, not because of it.
    • Our sense of constant contact with the world is not a genuine experience; instead, it is a form of immanence illusion. We have the sense of actuality when every question asked of our visual systems is answered so swiftly that it seems as though those answers were already there. And that's what frame-arrays provide us with: once any frame fills its terminals, the terminals of the other frames in its array are also filled. When every change of view engages frames whose terminals are already filled, albeit only be default, then sight seems instantaneous.
  • Expectations - Whenever we become familiar with some particular environment, we represent it with a frame-array whose terminals have already been filled. Then for each direction of motion inside that environment, our vision-systems activate the corresponding frames of that array. We also activate the corresponding frames even when we merely consider or imagine a certain body motion - and this amounts to knowing what to expect.
    • In general, each frame of a spatial frame-array is controlled by some direction-neme.
    • However in surroundings that are either especially familiar or whose relationships we do not understand, we may learn to use more specific stimuli instead of using direction-nemes to switch the frames. For example, when you approach a familiar door, the frame for the room that you expect to find behind that door might be activated, not by your direction of motion but by your recognition of that particular door.
  • The Frame Idea - Comes from a 1974 essay: "A Framework for Representing Knowledge".

26. Language- Frames

FC Bartlett: "Thinking... is possible only when a way has been found of breaking up the "massed" influence of past stimuli and situation, only when a device has already been discovered for conquering the sequential tyranny of past reactions. But though it is a later and a higher development, it does not supersede the method of images. It has its own drawbacks. Contrasted with imagining it loses something of vivacity, of vividness, of variety. Its prevailing instruments are words, and, not only because these are social, but also because in use they are necessarily strung out in sequence, they drop into habit reactions even more readily than images do. [With thinking] we run greater and greater risk of being caught up in generalities that may have little to do with actual concrete experience.

  • Understanding Words - A "party-invitation" frame - I was raised in a culture in which an invitation to a party carries the obligation to arrive well dressed and to bring a birthday present. Accordingly, when I read or hear that Mary has been invited to a party, I attribute to Mary the same sorts of subjective reactions and concerns that I would have in such a situation. Therefore, although the story never mentions clothes or gifts at all, to expect their possible involvement seems only simple common sense. But though it is common, it is not simple.
  • Understanding Stories - What makes a story comprehensible? What gives it coherency? The secret lies in how each phrase and sentence stirs frames into activity or helps already active ones to fill their terminals. When the first sentence of our story mentions a party, various frames are excited - and these are still active in the reader's mind when the next sentence is read. The ground is prepared for understanding the second sentence because so many agents are already ready to recognize possible references to presents, clothes, and other matters that might be related to birthday parties.
  • Sentence-Frames - How does the understanding listener know which slots in the frame to insert each word in the sentence? By arousing familiar frames and using standard grammatical forms, we can say a great deal in a very few words.
  • A Party-Frame - Dictionary definitions never say enough. Every child knows that a party is more than just a gathering assembled to celebrate someone's birthday. But no brief definition can describe the complicated customs, rules, and regulations that typical communities prescribe for such ceremonies.
    • To all their young participants, parties unfold exactly as a party should, with all these queer complexities. We take our social customs for granted, as though they were natural phenomena. Few guests or hosts will ever wonder why their parties have those explicit forms or ask about their origins. As far as any child can tell, that's just how parties ought to go; they always did and always will. And so it is with almost everything we know.
  • Story-Frames - We take it for granted that anyone can understand a story. But every kind of narrative demands some listening skills. To listen well, a child must acquire potent forms of self-control.
    • You can prepare the listener by saying, "Would you like to hear a story?" or simply "Once upon a time..." Such phrases have very specific effects: to set the listener into a norm and familiar state of expecting to hear a certain type of narrative - a story.
    • Most stories starts with just enough to set the scene. They they introduce some characters, with hints about their principal concerns. Next, we get some clues about some "main event" or problem to be solved. From that point on, the listener has a general idea of what comes next: there will be more development of the problem; then it will be resolved somehow; and then the story will end, perhaps by giving some practical or moral advice.
    • These magic story-starting words arouse, in knowing listeners' minds, great hosts of expectation frames to help them anticipate which terminals to fill. They also tell them that what comes after is fictional or, in any case, far too remote to activate much personal concern. They should disregard the normal sympathies one should feel when real persons meet the monstrous destinies so usual in children's tales.
  • Sentence and Nonsense - A word string seems "grammatical" if all its words fit quickly and easily into frames that connect suitably to one another. The distinction between sense and nonsense is only partly a matter of grammar. Ungrammatical expressions can frequently be meaningful when they lead to clear and stable mental states. Grammar is the servant of language, not the master.
  • Frames for Nouns - At various points in their development, most children seem suddenly to comprehend new kinds of sentences. Many scientists wonder why so many human languages use similar structures such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, clauses, and sentences. It is likely that some of these reflect what is genetically built into our language-agencies. The most common forms of phrases could arise not so much from the architecture of the language-agencies as from the machinery used by other agencies for representing objects, actions, differences, and purposes, and from how those other agencies manipulate their memories. The ways we think must have a strong and universal influence on how we speak - if only through its influence on the sorts of things we'll want to say.
  • Frames for Verbs - In the earliest stages of learning to speak, we simply fill the terminals of word-string frames with nemes for words. Then, later, we learn to fill those terminals with other filled-in language frames.
    • Each child must learn how the order of the words affects which terminal each phrase should fill.
    • How did language forms evolve? We have no record of their earliest forms, but they surely were affected at every stage by the kinds of questions and problems that seemed important at the time.
  • Language and Vision -The language-agency must be able to interrupt itself, while handling one phrase, to work on parts of another phrase, and this involves some complex short-term memory skills. But in vision, too, there must be similar processes involved in breaking scenes apart and representing them as composed of objects and relationships.
    • Among our ancestors, vision greatly predates language, so if these abilities are related, our language-agencies themselves more likely evolved from variants of genes that first evolved in shaping the architecture of our vision-systems.
  • Learning Language - The vocabulary of a language is the product of a project that spans the history of a culture and can involve millions of person years of work. Every sense of every word records some intellectual discovery that now outlives the myriad other, less distinguished thoughts that never earned a name.
    • Each person invents some new ideas, but most of these will die when their owners do, except for those that make their way into the culture's lexicon. Still, from that ever-growing reservoir we each inherit many thousands of powerful ideas that all our predecessors found.
    • But, we cannot learn meanings only by memorizing definitions: we must also understand them. Each situation in which a word is used must suggest some mixture of materials already in the mind of a listener, who then, alone, must attempt to assemble these ingredients into something that will work in consonance with other things already learned. Definitions sometimes help but one must separate the essences from the accidents of the context, link together structures and functions, and build connections to the other things one knows.
    • Along with the words, we also have to learn the grammar-tactics for using them. Most children start by using only one or two words at a time. Then, over the next two or three years, they learn to speak in sentences. It usually takes a full decade to learn most of the conventions of adult speech, but we often see relatively sudden advances over concentrated periods of time.
    • Many sections of our brains appear to demonstrate capacities for rearranging pronome roles even before we learn to speak. Perhaps we ought to wonder why it takes children so long to speak competently, when they already do so many similar things inside their heads.
  • Grammar - As we develop skills for building chains and trees from other frames, the language agency can learn to use corresponding grammar-tactics to express those chains - stringing together phrases and sentences with conjunction words like "and" and "but". As we improve our methods for controlling memories and managing interruptions, we can learn to combine those skills with clause-interrupting forms like "who" and "which".
    • There seems scarcely any limit to the complexity of our social inventions for expressing mental processes, and it takes most children many years to master all the language arts their ancestors evolved.
  • Coherent Discourse - We're normally quite unaware of how our grammar-tactics constrain us in our choices of words. We're often somewhat aware of other language-tactics we use to guide our listeners' minds - to change the focus from one theme to another, to adjust the levels of detail, to shift between foreground and setting.
    • We learn to use phrases like "by the way" to change the topic of concern, to say "for example" to shift to a finer level of detail, to say "but" to modify an expectation or to interrupt the usual flow, or to say "in any case" or "in spite of that" to indicate the end of an interruption or elaboration.
    • To understand what people say, we also exploit our vast stores of common knowledge, not only about how specific words are related to the subjects of concern, but also about how to express and discuss those subjects. Every human community evolves a great array of discourse-forms to shape its stories, explanations, conversations, discussions, and styles of argument.
    • Just as we learn grammar forms for fitting words to sentence-frames, we also build up stocks of plots to organize our story tales and standard personalities to fill the roles of their protagonists - and every child must learn these forms.

27. Censors and Jokes

  • Demons - Whenever we hear about a particular event, specific recognition-agents are thereby aroused. These then proceed actively to watch and wait for other related types of events. Because these recognition-agents lurk silently, to intervene only in certain circumstances, they are sometimes called "demons".
    • How easy should it be to activate demons? How long should they then remain active? If too few demons are aroused, we'll be slow to understand what's happening. But if too many become active, we'll get confused by false alarms.
    • There are no simple solutions to these problems, and what we call "understanding" is a huge accumulation of skills.
    • You might understand certain parts of a story by using separate, isolated demons; you might comprehend other aspects of that same story by using larger-scale processes that try to match the sequence of events to various remembered scripts; yet other understandings might depend upon which agents are aroused by various micronemes.
    • How much of the fascination in telling a story, or in listening to one, comes from the manipulations of our demons' expectations.
  • Suppressors - All communities evolve some prohibitions and taboos to tell their members what they shouldn't do. That, too, must happen in our minds: we accumulate memories to tell ourselves what we shouldn't think.
    • Suppressor-agents - Wait until you get a certain "bad idea". Then they prevent your taking the corresponding action, and make you wait until you think of some alternative. If a suppressor could speak, it would say, "Stop thinking that!"
    • Censor-agents - Need not wait until a certain bad idea occurs; instead, they intercept the states of mind that usually precede that thought. If a censor could speak, it would say "Don't even begin to think that!"
  • Censors - To prevent a particular mental state from occurring, an early-acting censor must learn to recognize all the states of mind that might precede it. thus, each censor may, in time, require a substantial memory bank. For all we know, each person accumulates millions of censor memories, to avoid the thought-patterns found to be ineffectual or harmful.
    • It is easier to notice what your mind does than to notice what it doesn't do, and this means that we can't use introspection to perceive the work of these inhibitory agencies. I suspect that this effect has seriously distorted our conceptions of psychology and that once we recognize the importance of censors and other forms of negative recognizers, we'll find that they constitute large portions of our minds.
    • Sometimes, our censors and suppressors must themselves be suppressed. In order to sketch out long-range plans, for example, we must adopt a style of thought that clears the mind of trivia and sets minor obstacles aside. But that could be very hard to do if too many censors remained on the scene; they'd make us shy away from strategies that aren't guaranteed to work, and tear apart our sketchy plans before we can start to accomplish them.
  • Exceptions to Logic - We search for "islands of consistency" within which ordinary reasoning seems safe. We work also to find and mark the unsafe boundaries of those domains.
    • In civilized communities, appointed guardians post signs to warn about sharp turns, thin ice, and animals that bite. And so do our philosophers, when they report to us their paradoxical discoveries - those tables of the l<iar who admits to lying and the Barber who shaves all the people who do not shave themselves. These valuable lessons teach us which thoughts we shouldn't think.
    • It is virtually impossible to state any facts about the real world that actually are always true. Exceptions are a fact of life because few facts are always true. Logic fails because it tries to find exceptions to this rule.
  • Jokes - Freud suggests that we form censors in our minds as barriers against forbidden thoughts and jokes are stories designed to fool the censors. A joke's power comes from a description that fits two different frames at once.
    • He suggested that children construct censors in response to prohibitions by their parents or peers. This explains why so many jokes involve taboos concerning cruelty, sexuality, and other subjects that human communities typically link to guilt, disgust, or shame.
    • Another theory was that nonsense jokes reflect "a wish to return to carefree childhood, when one was permitted to think without any compulsion to be logical, and to put words together without sense, for the simpler pleasures of rhythm or rhyme." Absurd results of reasoning must be tabooed as thoroughly as social mistakes and inanities! And that's why stupid thoughts can seem as humorous as antisocial ones.
  • Humor and Censorship - When we learn in a serious context, the result is to change connections among ordinary agents<; but when we learn in a humorous context, the principal result is to change the connections that involve our censors and suppressors.
    • We must make a sharp distinction between our positive, action-oriented memories (mental states which are desirable) and the negative, inhibitory memories (mental states which are undesirable) embodied in our censors.
    • When people do things that are good, we talk to them in encouraging tones - and this switches on their positive learning machinery.
    • When people do things we consider stupid or wrong, we then complain in scornful tones or laugh derisively - and this switches on their negative learning machinery. Scolding may tend to produce suppressors (who need to learn which mental states are undesirable), while laughing produces censors (who must remember which mental states were undesirable).
  • Laughter - It's function is to disrupt another person's reasoning. Seeing a person laugh creates such chaos in the mind that you can't proceed along your present train of thought. Derision makes you feel ridiculous; it prevents you from being serious. It focuses your attention on the present stat of mind. By preventing you from taking seriously your present thought, and thus proceeding to develop it, laughter gives you time to build a censor against that state of mind.
    • Humor must have grown along with our abilities to criticize ourselves, starting with simple internal suppressors that evolved into more sophisticated censors.
  • Good Humor - To ask how humor works in a grown-up person is to ask how everything works in them, since humor gets involved with so many other things.

28. The Mind and the World

  • The Myth of Mental Energy - Machines and brains require ordinary energy to do their jobs - and need no other mental forms of energy. Causality is quite enough to keep them working toward their goals.
  • Magnitude and Marketplace - At every moment of our lives, we're forced to choose between alternatives we can't compare. We turn to using quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things. To the extent that success in interchangeable with time or doof or energy, it's useful to treat pleasure as equivalent to wealth.
  • Quantity and Quality - Whenever we turn to measurements, we forfeit some uses of intellect. Currencies and magnitudes help us make comparisons only by concealing the differences among what they purport to represent.
    • Inside our brains, many agencies have come to influence one another by controlling the amounts of various chemicals in much the way that many kinds of human transactions have come to use substances like candy, coins, or bags of salt - or banknotes backed by promises.
  • Mind Over Matter - In order for hunger to keep us fed, it must engage some agency that gives priority to food-acquiring goals. To serve as useful "warning signs", feelings like pain and hunger must be engineered not simply to indicate dangerous conditions, but to anticipate them and warn us before too much damage is done.
    • Since our feelings of pain, depression, exhaustion, and discouragement are themselves mere products of our minds activities - and one that are engineered to warn us before we reach our ultimate limits - we need no extraordinary power of mind over matter to overcome them. It is merely a matter of finding ways to rearrange our priorities.
  • The Mind and the World - We spend our lives in several realms:
    • The ordinary physical world of objects that exist in space and time and which obey simple laws. When any object moves or changes, we can usually account for it in terms of other objects pushing it, or else of gravity or wind.
    • A social realm of persons, families, and companies, whose entities appear to be ruled by quite different kinds of causes and laws. Whenever a person moves or changes, we look for signs of intentions, ambitions, infatuations, promises, threats, and the like - none of which could affect a brick.
    • A psychological realm - inhabited by entities we call by names like meanings, ideas, and memories. These too appear to obey different rules.
    • Minds are simply what brains do. It doesn't matter what agents are; it only matters what they do - and what they are connected to.
  • Minds and Machines - Why are processes so hard to classify? In earlier times, we could usually judge machines and processes by how they transformed raw materials into finished products. But it makes no sense to speak of brains as though they manufacture thoughts the way factories make cars.
    • The difference is that brains use processes that change themselves - and this means we cannot separate such processes from the products they produce.
    • In particular, brains make memories, which change the ways we'll subsequently think. The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. Because the whole idea of self-modifying processes is new to our experience, we cannot yet trust our commonsense judgments about such matters.
  • Individual Identities - A mind is a way in which each state gives rise to the state that follows it. If a new machine that duplicated your brain cells as transistors had a suitable body and were placed in a similar environment, its sequence of thoughts would be essentially the same as yours - since its mental states would be equivalent to yours.
  • Overlapping Minds - I can make sense to think there exists, inside your brain, a society of different minds. Like members of a family, the different minds can work together to help each other, each still having its own mental experiences that the others never know about.
    • Several such agencies could have many agents in common, yet still have no more sense of each other's interior activities than do people whose apartments share opposite sides of the same walls. Like tenants in a rooming house, the process that share your brain need not share one another's mental lives.

29. The Realms of Thought

  • The Realms of Thought -
  • Several Thoughts at Once -
  • Paranomes - Many of our higher level conceptual-frames are really parallel arrays of analogous frames each active in a different realm.
    • Certain pronomes (call them "paranomes" can operate in several different realms at once. In this way, a single language-phrase can at the same time evoke different processes involved with social dispositions, spatial images, poetical fancies, musical thems, mathematical structures - or any other assortment of types of thought that don't interfere too much with one another.
  • Cross-Realm Correspondences - At one moment, control over language may reside in the realm of thought that is working most successfully; at the next moment, it may be the one experiencing the most difficulty. Each shift in attention affects how the various expressions will be interpreted, and this in turn can affect which realm will net take center stage.
  • The Problem of Unity -
  • Autistic Children - Infants can find social goals easier to accomplish than physical goals, while adults find the social goals more difficult. One way to explain this is to say that the presence of helpful people simplifies the infant's social world - since because of them, simpler actions solve harder problems. Another explanation might be that the infant's social world is just as complicated as that of the adult, except the presence of helpful people makes the infant's mind more powerful - by making the agencies inside those other people's brains available for exploitation by the agencies in the infant's brain.
    • A child that tried to see the world without dividing it into realms would find no simple rules at all that work across so large a range.
  • Likenesses and Analogies -
  • Metaphors - No two things or mental states ever are identical, so every psychological process must employ one means or another to induce the illusion of sameness. Every thought is to some degree a metaphor.
    • Once scientists like Volta and Ampere discovered how to represent electricity in terms of the pressures and flows of fluids, they could transport much of what they already knew about fluids to the domain of electricity.
    • Good metaphors are useful because they transport uniframes, intact, from one world into another. Such cross-realm correspondences can enable us to transport entire families of problems into other realms, in which we can apply to them some already well-developed skills. However, such correspondences are hard to find since most reformulations merely transform the uniframes of one realm into disorderly accumulations in the other realm.
    • Our greatest ideas, like our evolutionary genes, need form only once, by accident, and then can spread from brain to brain.

30. Mental Models

  • Knowing - When Jack says "Mary knows geometry," this indicates to us that Jack would probably be satisfied by Mary's answers to the questions about geometry that he would be disposed to ask.
    • We simply assume that the speaker would expect any typical person who know Mary to agree that she knows geometry. Assumptions like that allow us to communicate; unless there is some reason to think otherwise, we assume that all the things involved are typical. It does not bother us that a professional mathematician might not agree that Mary knows geometry - because a mathematician doesn't fit our stereotype of a typical person.
    • The part of you that claims you know geometry has little in common with the other parts that actually do geometry for you; those agencies are probably incapable of speech and probably devoid of thoughts about your knowledge and beliefs.
    • Doubt is not an enemy that sets constraints on what we know; the real danger to mental growth is perfect faith, doubt's antidote.
  • Knowing and Believing - The "I" in "I believe" is not a single stable thing. A person's mind holds different views in different realms. An astronomer has many ways of thinking about sunrise.
    • We each use many different views on situations and which we choose to use depends, from one moment to the next, upon the changing balance of power among our agencies.
    • When we commit ourselves to speak or act, we have to force ourselves into clear-cut, action-oriented states of mind in which most of our questions are suppressed. In everyday life, decisiveness is indispensable; otherwise we'd have to act so cautiously that nothing would get done. In the course of making practical decisions (and thereby turning off most agencies) we use words like "guess", "believe", and "know" to summarize our various varieties of certainty.
  • Mental Models - A book does not know what is written inside it, but it does contain knowledge. Saying that a person or machine possesses knowledge amounts to saying that some observer could employ that person or machine to answer certain kinds of questions.
    • Jack considers M to be a good model of A to the extent that he finds M useful for answering questions about A.
    • Jack's knowledge about A is simply whichever mental models, processes, or agencies Jack's other agencies can use to answer questions about A.
    • We make mental models of people, too, in order to "know" about their dispositions, motives, and possessions.
    • We make models of ourselves and use them to predict which sorts of things we'll later be disposed to do. Naturally, our models of ourselves will often provide us with wrong answers because they are not faultless ways to see ourselves, but merely self-made answering machines.
  • World Models - You can never really describe any worldly thing in any absolute sense. Whatever you purport to say about a thing, you're only expressing your own beliefs. But, even if our models of the world cannot yield good answers about the world as a whole, and even though their other answers are frequently wrong, they can tell us something about ourselves.
    • We can regard what we learn about our models of the world as constituting our models of our models of the world.
  • Knowing Ourselves - Eventually, when probing our own motivations, we simply stop and say "Because I simply wanted to." And when we find things hard to decide, we can simply say "I just decide". And this can help us interrupt what otherwise might be an endless chain of reasoning.
  • Freedom of Will - Every action we perform stems from a host of processes inside our minds. We sometimes understand a few of them, but most lie far beyond our ken. But none of us enjoys the thought that what we do depends on processes we do not know; we prefer to attribute our choices to volition, will, or self-control. We like to give names to what we do not know, and instead of wondering how we work, we simply talk of being "free". Perhaps it would be more honest to say, "My decision was determined by internal forces <i do not understand." But no one likes to feel controlled by something else.
    • Though it's futile to resist, we continue to regard both Cause and Chance as intrusions on our freedom of choice. There remains only one thing to do: we add another region to our model of our mind, a thing called "freedom of will", which lies beyond both kinds of constraint.
  • The Myth of the Third Alternative - No matter that the physical world provides no room for freedom of will: that concept is essential to our models of the mental realm. Too much of our psychology is based on it for us to ever give it up. We're virtually forced to maintain that belief, even though we know it's false - except of course, when we're inspired to find the flaws in all our beliefs, whatever may be the consequence to cheerfulness and mental peace.
  • Intelligence and Resourcefulness - What magic trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle:
    • The accumulation of myriad subagents - We learn many different ways to achieve each kind of goal.
    • The many realms of ordinary thought - When one viewpoint fails to solve a problem, we can adopt other perspectives
    • The endowment of several "instinctive" proto-minds - We embody different kinds of organizations for achieving many kinds of goals.
    • The hierarchies of administration grown in accord with Papert's principle - When simple methods fail, we can build new levels of organization.
    • The evolutionary vestiges of animals that still remain inside our brains - We use machinery evolved from fish, amphibia, reptiles, and earlier mammals.
    • The sequence of stages of the growing child's personality - We accumulate different personalities that we can apply to different situation.
    • The complex, ever)growing heritage of language and culture - We can use methods and ideas developed by millions of our ancestors. The subordination of thought processes to censors and suppressors - We do not need perfect methods, since we can remember how imperfect methods fail.

Appendix

  • Chance plays a major role in human differences, because each of us starts our by drawing lots from among our parents' genes. We are similar because those alternative genes are usually quite similar - and we are different because those genes are not identical.
  • All human brains are similar in size and shape but differ in many small respects because of different alternative genes.
  • The early-starting genes frame the large-scale outlines of the brain - and their uniformity explains why people are so similar on the broadest scale. These must be the genes responsible for what we call "human nature" - the predispositions every normal person shares.
  • In their first few days, human infants learn to distinguish people by their odors; then, over the next few weeks, they learn to recognize individuals by sound of voice; only after several months do they start to reliably distinguish the sights of faces. Most likely we learn to make each of these distinctions by several different methods, and it is probably no accident that these abilities develop in a sequence that corresponds to their increasing complexity.
  • Surely our human genes provide us with a great deal of instinctive wiring. However, far more than any other kind of animal, we also have machinery that can bridge new agencies across the older ones, so that we can learn to bury ancient instincts under modern social disciplines.

Glossary - Agents and Agencies

  • Agency - An assembly of parts considered in terms of what it can accomplish as a unit.
  • Agent - Any part or process of the mind that by itself is simple enough to understand - even though the interactions among groups of such agents may produce phenomena that are much harder to understand.
  • B-Brain - An agency (part of the brain) that is not connected to the world, but supervises or analyzes the work of an A-Brain (another part of the brain that is connected to the outside).
  • Censor - An agent that inhibits or suppresses the operation of other agents.
  • Demon - An agent that constantly watches for a certain condition and intervenes when it occurs.
  • Direction-Neme - An agent associated with a particular direction or region in space.
  • Isonome - A signal or pathway in the brain that has similar effects on several different agencies.
  • K-Line - The theory that certain kinds of memories are based on turning on sets of agents that reactivate one's previous partial mental states.
  • Memorizer - An agent that can reset an agency into some previously useful state.
  • Micromemory - The smallest components of our short-term memory systems.
  • Microneme - A neme involved with agents at a relatively low level
  • Neme - An agent whose output represents a fragment of an idea or state of mind. The context within which a typical agent words is largely determined by the activity of the nemes that reach it.
  • Nome - An agent whose outputs affect an agency in some predetermined manner. Its effect depends more on genetic architecture than on learning from experience.
  • Paranome - An agent that operates on agencies of several different mental realms at once, with similar effects on all of them.
  • Polyneme - An agent that arouses different activities, at the same time, in different agencies - as a result of learning from experience.
  • Pronome - A type of agent associated with a particular role or aspect of a representation. Pronome agents frequently control the attachments of terminals of frames to other frames.
  • Recognizer - An agent that becomes active in response to a particular pattern of input signals.
  • Sensor - An agent whose inputs are sensitive to stimuli that come from the world outside the brain.
  • Suppressor - A censor-like agent that works by disrupting a mental state that has already occurred. Suppressors are easier to construct than censors, and require less memory, but are much less efficient.
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