NICK@AI.AI.MIT.EDU (Nick Papadakis) (05/27/88)
Date: Fri, 13 May 88 06:00 EDT
From: Bruce E. Nevin <bnevin@cch.bbn.com>
Subject: the mind of society
To: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu
cc: bn@cch.bbn.com
A confession first about _The Society of Mind_: I have not yet read all
of this remarkable linearized hypertext document. I do not think this
matters for what I am saying here, but I certainly could be mistaken and
would welcome being corrected.
SOM gives a useful and even illuminating account of what might be going
on in mental process. I think this account misses the mark in the
following way:
While SOM demonstrates in an intellectually convincing way that the
experience of being a unitary self or an ego is illusory, it still
assumes that individual persons are separate. It even appears to
identify minds with brains in a one-one correspondence. But the logic
of interacting intelligent agents applies in obvious ways to interacting
persons. What then, for example, of the mind of society?
(I bring to this training and experience in family therapy. Much of the
subconscious mental processes and communications of family members serve
to constitute and maintain the family as a homeostatic system--analogous
to the traffic of SOM agents maintaining the ego, see below.
Individuals--especially those out of communication with family members--
recreate relationships from their families in their relationships
outside the family; and vice versa, as any parent knows. I concur with
Gilbert Cockton's remarks about social context. If in alienation we
pretend social context doesn't matter, we just extend the scope of that
which we ignore, i.e. that which we relegate to subconsciousness.)
Consider the cybernetic/constructivist view that mind is not
transcendent but rather is immanent (an emergent property) in the
cybernetic loop structure of what is going on. I believe SOM is
consistent with this view as far as it goes, but that the SOM account
could and should go farther--cf e.g. writings of Gregory Bateson, Paul
Watzlawick, Maturana, Varela, and others; and in the AI world, some
reaching in this direction in Winograd & Flores _Understanding
Computers_.
Minsky cites Freud ("or possibly Poincare'") as introducing serious
consideration of subconscious thought. However, the Buddhists, for
example, are pretty astute students of the mind, and have been
investigating these matters quite systematically for a long time.
What often happens when walking, jogging, meditating, laughing, just
taking a deep sighing breath, etc is that there are temporarily no
decisions to be made, no distinctions to be discriminated, and the
reactive mind, the jostling crowd of interacting agents, quiets down a
bit. It then becomes possible to observe the mental process more
"objectively". The activity doesn't stop ("impermanence" or ceaseless
change is the byword here). It may become apparent that this activity
is and always was out of control. What brings an activity of an agent
(using SOM terms) above the threshold between subconscious and conscious
mental activity? What lets that continuing activity slip out of
awareness? Not only are the activities out of control--most of them
being most of the time below the surface of the ocean, so to speak, out
of awareness--but even the constant process of ongoing mental and
emotional states, images, and processes coming to the surface and
disappearing again below the surface turns out also to be out of
control.
This temporary abeyance in the need to make decisions has an obvious
relation to Minsky's speculation about "how we stop deciding" (in
AIList V6 #98):
MM> I claim that we feel free when we decide to not try further to
MM> understand how we make the decisions: the sense of freedom comes from a
MM> particular act - in which one part of the mind STOPs deciding, and
MM> accepts what another part has done. I think the "mystery" of free will
MM> is clarified only when we realize that it is not a form of decision
MM> making at all - but another kind of action or attitude entirely, namely,
MM> of how we stop deciding.
The report here is that if you stop deciding voluntarily--hold the
discrimination process in abeyance for the duration of sitting in
meditation, for example, not an easy task--there is more to be
discovered than the subjective feeling of freedom. Indeed, it can seem
the antithesis of freedom and free will, at times!
So the agents of SOM are continually churning away, and if they're
predetermined it's not in any way that amounts to prediction and control
as far as personal awareness is concerned. And material from this
ongoing chatter continually rises into awareness and passes away out of
awareness, utterly out of personal control. (If you don't believe me,
look for yourself. It is a humbling experience for one wedded to
intellectual rigor and all the rest, I can tell you.)
Evidently, this fact of impermanence is due to there being no ego there
to do any controlling. Thus, one comes experientially to the same
conclusion reached by the intellectual argumentation in SOM: that there
is no self or ego to control the mind. Unless perhaps it be an emergent
property of the loop structures among the various agents of SOM.
Cybernetics has to do with control, after all. (Are emergent properties
illusory? Ilya Prigogine probably says no. But the Buddhists say the
whole ball of wax is illusory, all mental process from top to bottom.)
Here, the relation between "free will" and creativity becomes more
accessible. Try substituting "creativity" for "free will" in all the
discussion thus far on this topic and see what it sounds like. It may
not be so easy to sustain the claim that "there is no creativity because
everything is either determined or random." And although there is a
profound relation between creativity and "reaching into the random" (cf
Bateson's discussions of evolution and learning wrt double-bind theory),
that relation may say more about randomness than it does about
creativity.
If the elementary unit of information and of mind is a difference that
makes a difference (Bateson), then we characterize as random that in
which we can find no differences that make a difference. Randomness is
dependent on perspective. Changes in perspective and access to new
perspectives can instantly convert the random to the non-random or
structured. As we have seen in recent years, "chaos" is not random,
since we can discern in its nonlinearity differences that make a
difference. (Indeed, a cardinal feature of nonlinearity as I understand
it is that small differences of input can make very large differences of
output, the socalled "butterfly effect".) From the point of view of
personal creativity, "reaching into the random" often means reaching
into an irrelevant realm for analogy or metaphor, which has its own
structure unrelated in any obvious or known way to the problem domain.
(Cf. De Bono.) "Man's reach shall e'er exceed his grasp,/Else what's a
meta for?" (Bateson, paraphrasing Browning.)
It is interesting that the Buddhist experience of the Void--no ego, no
self, no distinctions to be found (only those made by mind)--is logically
equivalent to the view associated with Vedanta, Qabala, neoplatonism,
and other traditions, that there is but one Self, and that the personal
ego is an illusory reflection of That i.e. of God. ("No distinctions
because there is no self vs other" is logically equivalent to "no
distinctions because there is but one Self and no other", the
singularity of zero.) SOM votes with the Buddhists, if it matters, once
you drop the presumed one-one correspondence of minds with brains.
On the neoplatonist view, there is one Will, and it is absolutely free.
It has many centers of expression. You are a center of expression for
that Will, as am I. Fully expressing your particular share of (or
perspective on) that Will is the most rewarding and fulfilling thing you
can do for yourself; it is in fact your heart's desire, that which you
want to be more than anything else. It is also the most rewarding and
beneficial thing you can possibly do for others; this follows directly
from the premise that there is but one Will. (This is thus a
perspective that is high in synergy, using Ruth Benedict's 1948 sense of
that much buzzed term.) You as a person are of course free not to
discover and not to do that which is your heart's desire, so the
artifactual, illusory ego has free will too. It's "desire" is to
continue to exist, that is, to convince you and everyone else that it is
real and not an illusion.
Whether you buy this or not, you can still appreciate and use the
important distinction between cleverness (self acting to achieve desired
arrangement of objectified other) and wisdom (acting out of the
recognition of self and other as one whole). I would add my voice to
others asking that we develop not just artificial cleverness, but
artificial wisdom. Winograd & Flores again point in this direction.
Bruce Nevin
bn@cch.bbn.com
<usual_disclaimer>NICK@AI.AI.MIT.EDU (Nick Papadakis) (05/28/88)
Date: Wed, 25 May 88 12:49 EDT
From: Bruce E. Nevin <bnevin@cch.bbn.com>
Subject: the mind of society
To: ailist@ai.ai.mit.edu
cc: bn@cch.bbn.com
A confession first about _The Society of Mind_: I have not yet read all
of this remarkable linearized hypertext document. I do not think this
matters for what I am saying here, but I certainly could be mistaken and
would welcome being corrected.
SOM gives a useful and even illuminating account of what might be going
on in mental process. I think this account misses the mark in the
following way:
While SOM demonstrates in an intellectually convincing way that the
experience of being a unitary self or an ego is illusory, it still
assumes that individual persons are separate. It even appears to
identify minds with brains in a one-one correspondence. But the logic
of interacting intelligent agents applies in obvious ways to interacting
persons. What then, for example, of the mind of society?
(I bring to this training and experience in family therapy. Much of the
subconscious mental processes and communications of family members serve
to constitute and maintain the family as a homeostatic system--analogous
to the traffic of SOM agents maintaining the ego, see below.
Individuals--especially those out of communication with family members--
recreate relationships from their families in their relationships
outside the family; and vice versa, as any parent knows. I concur with
Gilbert Cockton's remarks about social context. If in alienation we
pretend social context doesn't matter, we just extend the scope of that
which we ignore, i.e. that which we relegate to subconsciousness.)
Consider the cybernetic/constructivist view that mind is not
transcendent but rather is immanent (an emergent property) in the
cybernetic loop structure of what is going on. I believe SOM is
consistent with this view as far as it goes, but that the SOM account
could and should go farther--cf e.g. writings of Gregory Bateson, Paul
Watzlawick, Maturana, Varela, and others; and in the AI world, some
reaching in this direction in Winograd & Flores _Understanding
Computers_.
Minsky cites Freud ("or possibly Poincare'") as introducing serious
consideration of subconscious thought. However, the Buddhists, for
example, are pretty astute students of the mind, and have been
investigating these matters quite systematically for a long time.
What often happens when walking, jogging, meditating, laughing, just
taking a deep sighing breath, etc is that there are temporarily no
decisions to be made, no distinctions to be discriminated, and the
reactive mind, the jostling crowd of interacting agents, quiets down a
bit. It then becomes possible to observe the mental process more
"objectively". The activity doesn't stop ("impermanence" or ceaseless
change is the byword here). It may become apparent that this activity
is and always was out of control. What brings an activity of an agent
(using SOM terms) above the threshold between subconscious and conscious
mental activity? What lets that continuing activity slip out of
awareness? Not only are the activities out of control--most of them
being most of the time below the surface of the ocean, so to speak, out
of awareness--but even the constant process of ongoing mental and
emotional states, images, and processes coming to the surface and
disappearing again below the surface turns out also to be out of
control.
This temporary abeyance in the need to make decisions has an obvious
relation to Minsky's speculation about "how we stop deciding" (in
AIList V6 #98):
MM> I claim that we feel free when we decide to not try further to
MM> understand how we make the decisions: the sense of freedom comes from a
MM> particular act - in which one part of the mind STOPs deciding, and
MM> accepts what another part has done. I think the "mystery" of free will
MM> is clarified only when we realize that it is not a form of decision
MM> making at all - but another kind of action or attitude entirely, namely,
MM> of how we stop deciding.
The report here is that if you stop deciding voluntarily--hold the
discrimination process in abeyance for the duration of sitting in
meditation, for example, not an easy task--there is more to be
discovered than the subjective feeling of freedom. Indeed, it can seem
the antithesis of freedom and free will, at times!
So the agents of SOM are continually churning away, and if they're
predetermined it's not in any way that amounts to prediction and control
as far as personal awareness is concerned. And material from this
ongoing chatter continually rises into awareness and passes away out of
awareness, utterly out of personal control. (If you don't believe me,
look for yourself. It is a humbling experience for one wedded to
intellectual rigor and all the rest, I can tell you.)
Evidently, this fact of impermanence is due to there being no ego there
to do any controlling. Thus, one comes experientially to the same
conclusion reached by the intellectual argumentation in SOM: that there
is no self or ego to control the mind. Unless perhaps it be an emergent
property of the loop structures among the various agents of SOM.
Cybernetics has to do with control, after all. (Are emergent properties
illusory? Ilya Prigogine probably says no. But the Buddhists say the
whole ball of wax is illusory, all mental process from top to bottom.)
Here, the relation between "free will" and creativity becomes more
accessible. Try substituting "creativity" for "free will" in all the
discussion thus far on this topic and see what it sounds like. It may
not be so easy to sustain the claim that "there is no creativity because
everything is either determined or random." And although there is a
profound relation between creativity and "reaching into the random" (cf
Bateson's discussions of evolution and learning wrt double-bind theory),
that relation may say more about randomness than it does about
creativity.
If the elementary unit of information and of mind is a difference that
makes a difference (Bateson), then we characterize as random that in
which we can find no differences that make a difference. Randomness is
dependent on perspective. Changes in perspective and access to new
perspectives can instantly convert the random to the non-random or
structured. As we have seen in recent years, "chaos" is not random,
since we can discern in its nonlinearity differences that make a
difference. (Indeed, a cardinal feature of nonlinearity as I understand
it is that small differences of input can make very large differences of
output, the socalled "butterfly effect".) From the point of view of
personal creativity, "reaching into the random" often means reaching
into an irrelevant realm for analogy or metaphor, which has its own
structure unrelated in any obvious or known way to the problem domain.
(Cf. De Bono.) "Man's reach shall e'er exceed his grasp,/Else what's a
meta for?" (Bateson, paraphrasing Browning.)
It is interesting that the Buddhist experience of the Void--no ego, no
self, no distinctions to be found (only those made by mind)--is logically
equivalent to the view associated with Vedanta, Qabala, neoplatonism,
and other traditions, that there is but one Self, and that the personal
ego is an illusory reflection of That i.e. of God. ("No distinctions
because there is no self vs other" is logically equivalent to "no
distinctions because there is but one Self and no other", the
singularity of zero.) SOM votes with the Buddhists, if it matters, once
you drop the presumed one-one correspondence of minds with brains.
On the neoplatonist view, there is one Will, and it is absolutely free.
It has many centers of expression. You are a center of expression for
that Will, as am I. Fully expressing your particular share of (or
perspective on) that Will is the most rewarding and fulfilling thing you
can do for yourself; it is in fact your heart's desire, that which you
want to be more than anything else. It is also the most rewarding and
beneficial thing you can possibly do for others; this follows directly
from the premise that there is but one Will. (This is thus a
perspective that is high in synergy, using Ruth Benedict's 1948 sense of
that much buzzed term.) You as a person are of course free not to
discover and not to do that which is your heart's desire, so the
artifactual, illusory ego has free will too. It's "desire" is to
continue to exist, that is, to convince you and everyone else that it is
real and not an illusion.
Whether you buy this or not, you can still appreciate and use the
important distinction between cleverness (self acting to achieve desired
arrangement of objectified other) and wisdom (acting out of the
recognition of self and other as one whole). I would add my voice to
others asking that we develop not just artificial cleverness, but
artificial wisdom. Winograd & Flores again point in this direction.
Bruce Nevin
bn@cch.bbn.com
<usual_disclaimer>
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