oded@wisdom.weizmann.ac.IL (Oded Maler) (05/25/89)
Regarding R. Kohout's attack on "Society of Mind": 1) The phrase "Mind is what Brains do" does not necessarily imply strict reductionism. I see it more as a kind of conventionalism, like saying "Life is what Cells do" or "Culture is what humans do". It does not mean that mind can be explained totally on the basis of neural implementation. 2) I don't see the relevance of the Perceptron book, which deals with the limitations of linear threshold function to the discussion. 3) Kohout considers Minsky's attitude towards brain laterality and says: > (..) it contradicts a very extensive body of well respected *scientific* > evidence. Let's not use well-respectedness as an argument, this will contradict the essence of the original provocation. I think that the "society" approach can live well with a refined laterlity model. Maybe there are some physical properties of the hemispheres that make certain kinds of agencies more likely to develop in the right or left one. This of course depends on the individual history of the person in question. I cannot see any experimental evidence that will favor the more simplistic laterality hypothesis. I'll be glad to hear more about it from more knowledgable persons. 4) Consider this paragraph: >It seems to me the absolute absurdity to claim that self is an illusion, >which is essentially what Minsky would have us believe. It certainly provides >an easy answer to the question, "How did _I_ emerge from this purely physical >world?" You didn't. You're just fooling yourself. You aren't, which is to say >_you_ don't really exist, you just think you do. The problem >is, if I don't exist, why should I need to be fooled? What's being misled >by the illusion? To me this does not look as an absurdity at all. Maybe the self is an illusion in the same sense as are other concepts that describe an aggregation of large multi-dimensional entities such as "US", "AI community", "public opinion", "Chinese civilization", "the spirit of the 60" etc. The only difference between those and the "self" is that this illusion is in the eyes of "itself". Why should we be fooled? It could be some kind of a successful survival heuristics if you believe in Darwinism. 5) I have not come to praise Minsky nor to bury his ideas. I find "Society of Mind" as a collection of speculations, some of which strongly compatible with my own intuition and with other ("distributed") trends in contemporary thinking. Oded Maler Department of Applied Mathematics Weizmann Institute of Science Rehovot 76100, Israel (oded@wisdom.bitnet or oded@wisdom.weizmann.ac.il)