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

8. A Theory of Memory

• K-Lines: A Theory of Memory -
• Re-membering -
• Mental States and Dispositions -
• Partial Mental States -
• Level Bands -
• Levels -
• Fringes -
• Societies of Memories -
• Knowledge-Trees -
• Levels and Classifications -
• Layers of Societies -

9. Summaries

• Wanting and Liking -
• Gerrymandering -
• Learning from Failure -
• Enjoying Discomfort -

10. Papert's Principle

• Piaget's Experiments -
• Reasoning About Amounts -
• Priorities -
• Papert's Principle -
• The Society of More -
• About Piaget's Experiments -
• The Concept of Concept -
• Education and Development -
• Learning a Hierarchy -