The Society of Mind

Graduate · Historical course

Fall 2011

This course is an introduction to the theory that tries to explain how minds are made from collections of simpler processes. It treats such aspects of thinking as vision, language, learning, reasoning, memory, consciousness, ideals, emotions, and personality. It incorporates ideas from psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science to resolve theoretical issues such as wholes vs. parts, structural vs. functional descriptions, declarative vs. procedural representations, symbolic vs. connectionist models, and logical vs. common-sense theories of learning.

Readings

[EM] = Minsky, Marvin. The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind . Simon & Schuster, 2007. ISBN: 9780743276641. The text is also available online on Professor Minsky’s homepage . ↗
Listed reading
Students are expected to have read The Society of the Mind before the semester starts.
Listed reading
———. Society of the Mind . Simon & Schuster, 1988. ISBN: 9780671657130.
Listed reading
SES #: 1 · TOPICS: Introduction · READINGS: [EM] Introduction
Reading assignment
SES #: 2 · TOPICS: Falling in Love · READINGS: [EM] Chapter 1
Reading assignment
Warburton, D. M., ed. “Pleasure systems in the brain.” In Pleasure: The Politics and The Reality . John Wiley & Sons, 1994, pp. 5–14 + refs. ISBN: 9780471942290.
Listed reading
Sagan, Carl. “A high level overview of minds.” Chapter 11 in Cosmos . Random House, 2002. ISBN: 9780375508325.
Listed reading
[EM] Chapter 2 What drives people to act? Where do people acquire their original goals?
Listed reading
Hobbs, Jerry R. and Andrew Gordon. “Goals in a formal theory of commonsense pychology.” (PDF) Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS-2010), Toronto, Canada, May 11-14, 2010. Hobbs and Gordon explain a technique for modeling folk theories of intentional behavior. Introduces the notion of the top-level “Thrive” goal. ↗
Recommended
5 · From Panic to Suffering · [EM] Chapter 3
Recommended
6 · Layers of Mental Activities · Schwartz, Barry. “Pitfalls on the Road to the Psychology of Hope.” (PDF) In The Science of Optimism and Hope . Edited by J. Gillham. Templeton Foundation Press. 2000. pp.399-412. Ethical dilemmas for positive psychology—do they have the right to meddle with people’s top-level goals? … or to induce happiness? ↗
Recommended
7 · Layered Knowledge Representations · [EM] Chapter 4 What is Consciousness? Minsky answers this, first by showing this question is ill-founded.
Recommended
[EM] Chapter 5 Model–6 and the layered critic-selector architecture.
Recommended
Langley, Pat, John E. Laird, and Seth Rogers. Cognitive Architectures: Research Issues and Challenges . Cognitive Systems Research 10 no. 2 (2009). Discusses current cognitive architectures that exist for organizing large artificial intelligence projects. Also, shared properties of cognitive architectures as well future directions for what is needed is discussed—a rare overview of a very complicated field. This paper was referenced in class when Minsky was wondering if there is a good overview of different types of representations and what problems they are both good and, more importantly, bad at solving. ↗
Recommended
[EM] Chapter 6
Recommended
Singh, Push, Ian Eslick, et al. “Computing Commonsense.” (PDF) BT Technology Journal 22 no. 4 (2004). An Overview of How the Commonsense Computing Approach to Building Commonsense Reasoning Systems. ↗
Recommended
Mueller, Erik T. “Automating Commonsense Reasoning using Event Calculus.” (PDF) Communications of the ACM 52 no. 1 (2009). Event Calculus is an extention of First Order logic designed for effectively reasoning about events. While still committed to logical inference, this is a well defined approach to commonsense reasoning and Mueller is very clear communicator. ↗
Recommended
GoogleTalksArchive. Human Computation: Luis von Ahn, July 26, 2006. August 22, 2012. Accessed March 3, 2013. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tx082gDwGcM . A highly-entertaining video of CMU researcher’s thesis on collecting knowledge from people. This approach, known as “human computation”, is taken in the OpenMind project. ↗
Recommended
GoogleTalksArchive. Computers versus Common Sense: Douglas Lenat, May 30, 2006. August 22, 2012. Accessed March 3, 2013. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAtn-4fhuWA . A very nice talk Lenat gave at Google about the motivations behind the Cyc project and its current state. ↗
Recommended
10 · Question and Answer Session 3 · [EM] Chapter 7 A short chapter describing many different techniques for inference and problems with reasoning.
Recommended
11 · Mind vs. Brain: Confessions of a Defector · [EM] Chapter 8 What distinguishes genius from everyday thinking? What are the ways to learn from mistakes?
Recommended
[EM] Chapter 9
Recommended
Dennett, Daniel. “The Origin of Selves.” Cogito 3 (1989): pp. 163-173. Short, easy to read discussion of philisophical notions of selfhood, the boundaries of selves, a discussion of multiple selves and multiple personality disorder.
Recommended
Kosslyn, Stephen. “On the Evolution of Human Motivation: Social Prosthetics." In Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience . Edited by S.M. Platek, T.K. Shackelford, and J.P. Keenan. MIT Press, 2006. Suggesting “self models” may extend in scope to include other people. Interesting and uplifiting paper by Harvard vision psychologist. ↗
Recommended

Sources

Course catalogue ↗Historical OpenCourseWare
MIT OCW readings ↗
MIT OCW syllabus ↗
Historical MIT OpenCourseWare offering. Named reading entries and schedule topics are automatically extracted from the linked source pages.