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 - 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
• 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