The Society of Mind

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
• Novelists and Reductionists
• Parts and Wholes
• Holes and Parts
• Easy Things are Hard
• Are People Machines?

3. Conflict and Compromise

• Conflict
• Noncompromise
• Hierarchies
• Heterarchies
• Destructiveness
• Pain and Pleasure Simplified

4. The Self

• The Self
• One Self or Many?
• The Soul
• The Conservative Self
• Exploitation
• Self-Control
• Long-Range Plans
• Ideals

5. Individuality

• Circular Causality
• Unanswerable Questions
• The Remote-Control Self
• Personal Identity
• Fashion and Style
• Traits
• Permanent Identity

6. Insight and Introspection

• Consciousness
• Signals and Signs
• Thought Experiments
• B-Brains
• Frozen Reflection
• Momentary Mental Time
• The Causal Now
• Thinking Without Thinking
• Heads in the Clouds
• Worlds Out of Mind
• In-Sight
• Internal Communication
• Self-Knowledge is Dangerous
• Confusion

7. Problems and Goals

• Intelligence
• Uncommon Sense
• The Puzzle Principle
• Problem Solving
• Learning and Memory
• Reinforcement and Reward
• Local Responsibility
• Difference-Engines
• Intentions
• Genius