{"id":17821,"date":"2011-08-19T14:38:20","date_gmt":"2011-08-19T14:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=17821"},"modified":"2012-07-09T16:04:00","modified_gmt":"2012-07-09T16:04:00","slug":"the-emotion-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=17821","title":{"rendered":"The Emotion Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"top\" \/><em>Marvin Minsky<\/em><\/p>\n<h4>Introduction<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Each of our major &#8220;emotional states&#8221; results from turning certain . resources on while turning certain others off-and thus changing some ways that our brains behave. p.4 <em>Intersections between resources may explain why we may seem to be very different at times and yet never completely distincts (except for schizophrenia?).<\/em><\/li>\n<li>If a program works in only one way, then it gets stuck when that method fails. But a program that has several ways to proceed could then switch to some other approach, or search for a suitable substitute. p.6 <em>It requires that the program is able to perform self-evaluation. Otherwise it will only be a processing pipeline that represent information for latter cognitive processes that do evaluate their success. Is frame stability a good criterion?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Falling in love<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>In any case, this book will suggest that this so-called &#8220;stream of conscious- . ness&#8221; is an illusion that comes because each higher-level part of one&#8217;s mind has virtually no access to knowledge about what happens in most of one&#8217;s other processes. p.27<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Attachments and goals<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>What I am suggesting is that selfconscious emotions like Pride and Shame play special roles; they help us learn ends instead of means. Thus, where trial and error teach us new ways to achieve the goals we already maintain-attachment-related blame and praise teach us which goals we should discard or retain. p.39<\/li>\n<li>The if must describe some relevant features and relationships of the situation you faced. The Then must describe some relevant aspects of the successful actions you took. p.49 <em> <\/em><\/li>\n<li>However, older children better tolerate this, presumably because each child makes &#8220;internal . models&#8221; that help them to predict their Imprimers&#8217; reactions. Then each such model would serve its child as an &#8220;internalized&#8221; system of values-and this could be how people develop what we call ethics, conscience, or moral sense. p.50 <em>Isn&#8217;t it exactly what determines attachment? The ability to simulate others via internal models? And we might begin with such pre-conceived template models for parents. Later, we develop more, and even models for groups of people. Seems to be a connection with strange loops here&#8230;<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>From pain to suffering<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>I&#8217;ll assume that everyone possesses at least these three different types of Critics: A Corrector declares that you are doing something dangerous. &#8220;You must stop right now, because you&#8217;re moving your hand toward aflame. &#8221; A Suppressor interrupts before you begin the action you&#8217;re planfling to take. &#8220;Don&#8217;t start to move your hand toward that flame, lest it get burned. &#8221; A Censor acts yet earlier, to prevent that idea from occurring to ! you-so you never even consider the option of moving your hand in that direction. p.82<\/li>\n<li>When you sit at a table across from friends, you cannot see their backs or legs, but this is of no concern to you because most of what you think you see comes from your internal models and memories. For while some parts of your brain get information from the outer world, most of them arc reacting to information they get from other processes inside your brain. p.92 <em>Visual attention may thus not be attracted toward salient stimuli, but toward any part of the visual field from which we can extract novel information that requires visual analysis. Eyes may wander around if nothing is to be found, or they may even unfocus and not attend to anything at all!<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Consciousness<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>All this should lead us to conclude that consciousness is a suitcase-like word that we use to refer to many different mental activities, which don&#8217;t have a single cause or origin-and, surely, this is why people have found it so hard to &#8220;understand what consciousness is.&#8221; The trouble was that they tried to pack into a single box all the products of many processes that go on in different parts of our brains-and this produced a problem that will remain unsolvable until we find ways to chop it up. p.97 <em>Are some consciousness-related activities dependent on other such activities? Is there any<\/em> <em>hierarchical structure among them? Could it be that some animals are considered less consciouss because they exhibit only a subset activities and that some are not conscious because they lack them all?<\/em><\/li>\n<li>This book suggests many reasons to think that our human mental resources are organized into at least these six levels of processes, as illustrated in the next figure. p.102<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of ideas within a wall of words.&#8221; -Samuel Butler p.109<\/li>\n<li>In any case, most of our mental processes work in ways that don&#8217;t cause US to think or reflect about why and how we are doing them. However, when those processes don&#8217;t fonction well, or when they encounter obstacles, this starts up high-level activities that often include these kinds of properties: (l) They use the models we make of ourselves. (2) They tend to be more serial and less parallel. (3) They tend to use symbolic descriptions. (4) They make use of our most recent memories. p.112<\/li>\n<li>We might suppose that it would be wonderful to be constantly aware of everything that is happening-but the more frequently our impressions change, the harder it will be for us to find significance in them. The idea that we exist in the present moment may be indispensable in everyday life, but the power of our high-level descriptions comes mainly from their stahility; for us to sense what persists and what changes through time, we must be able to compare things with their descriptions from the recent past. p.118<\/li>\n<li>Drew McDermott 1992: &#8220;The key idea is not just that the system has a model of itself, but that it has a model of itself as conscious. A computer might have a model of its environment, in which it models itself as a piece of furniture. It wouldn&#8217;t be conscious on that account.&#8221; p.123<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/p102.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-17921 alignnone\" title=\"p102\" src=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/p102-150x150.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/p103.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-thumbnail wp-image-17931\" title=\"p103\" src=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/p103-150x150.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<h4>Levels of mental activities<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Indeed, that would cause so much trouble that, rather than try to examine itself, it would be better for a system to make simplified models of its condition-and record these in some memory banks. Then later it can self-reflect (if only to a certain extent), by applying the same sorts of processes (to those memories) that it already knows how to apply to inputs that come from external events. p.142<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;We don&#8217;t see things as they are. We see things as we are.&#8221; -AnaisNin p.149<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Common sense<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>If you have already linked the same symbol to an appropriate set of multiple meanings, then switching may take no time at all-if the parts of your brain that work in those other realms have already done some processing. This could happen, for example, when you switch from thinking of that book as an object to regarding it as a possession or as a potential collection of knowledge. p.168 <em>Such panalogies may be at the core of human abstraction abilities because they allow us to easily build relationships between symbolic ideas in the same way we&#8217;re used to make relationships between objects.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>It is often supposed that such actions are done under continuous &#8220;feedback control&#8221; -by processes that keep working to reduce your distance from your goal. However, that cannot be generally true because human reactions are so slow that it takes about one-fifth of a second to react to events that one did not expect. This means that you cannot change what you are doing right now; all you can do is revise the plan that you&#8217;ve made for what you will do after that. p.173 <em>Impulses of attentional focuse need be less and less frequent with increasing experience; we do not need to concentrate anymore&#8230;<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Robertson Davies 1992: &#8220;You like the mind to be a neat machine equipped to work efficiently, if narrowly, and with no extra bits or useless parts. I like the mind to be a dustbin of scraps of bril- . liam fabric, odd gems, worthless but fascinating curiosities, tinsel, quaint bits of carving, and a reasonable amount of healthy dirt., Shake the machine and it goes out of order; shake the dustbin and it adjusts itself beautifully to its new position.&#8221; p.174<\/li>\n<li>Alan Watts 1960: &#8220;No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve in quality as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing it is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in . improving them we may forget altogether to live them.&#8221; p.185<\/li>\n<li>We should never say &#8220;merely&#8221; for metaphors, because that is what all descriptions are; we can never state just what something is, we can only describe what something is like-that is, to describe it in terms of other things that seem to us to have some similar properties-and then to consider the differences. p.187<\/li>\n<li>In any case, as one increases one&#8217;s proficiency, one may come to feel a sense of mastery, as though one understands an entire complex realm, and can think of it as a single whole. But this can be an illusion that comes from forgetting the effort of learning one&#8217;s skills and then turning them into efficient but mindless scripts-in short, by replacing the process of &#8220;figuring out&#8221; by an unreflective reaction-machine. When this happens, it could be one reason why many achievers become less able to teach others to imitate their techniques. p.195<\/li>\n<li>Thus, most of our external sensots react only to rather rapid changes in conditions. (However, we also have additional sensors that do not fade away, but keep responding to certain particular harmful conditions.) p.196 <em>The adaptation speed of a sensor might have been tuned to the frequency of changes of events it is &#8220;made&#8221; to detect.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Perhaps your A-Brain is still processing it, but your B-Brain has stopped reacting to it. It will be much the same for the visual scenes; when the train enters a forest, you&#8217;ll start seeing trees-but soon you&#8217;ll start to ignore them. What could cause such meanings to fade? p.196 <em>This connects with the perception of pain, and the fact that external events can bring attention to the B-brain to something already processed by the A-brain.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Music can move us through brief emotional states, and this can potentially teach us how to manage our feelings by giving us familiarity to transitions between the states that we know and thus gain greater confidence in handling them.&#8221;\u00a0 -Matthew McCauley , p.198 <em>Could it be possible to make listeners less confident about their emotional transitions?<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Notice that to make and use an analogy, one must work on three different levels at once: (JJ descriptiom of the original objects, (2) descriptions of their relationships, and (3) descriptions of the differences between those relationships. p.209<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Thinking<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>In other words, we can sometimes improve our Ways to Think by creating higher-level Selectors and Critics that help to reduce the sizes of the searches we make. However, to make such kinds of credit assignments, I we&#8217;ll need to use higher reflective levels of thinking than those that have\u00a0 hitherto been proposed in most traditional &#8220;theories of learning.&#8221; p.232 <em>This kind of selective critical memory might be what makes the bulk of what we call &#8220;intelligence&#8221;.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>This suggests an idea about what we mean when we use our most common emotion-words; they refer to classes of mental conditions that produce external signs that make our behaviors rzore predictable to the persons with whom we are dealing. Thus, for our ancestors, those bodily signs served as useful ways to communicate such so-called &#8220;primary&#8221; emotions as Anger, Fear, Sadness, Disgust, Surprise, Curiosity, and Joy. [&#8230;] In other words, your external expressions of anger may serve not only to frighten your enemies, but to also ensure that you will stay frightened for long enough to carry out some actions that might save your life. p.233<\/li>\n<li>Poincar\u00e9 concluded that when making his discoveries, he must have used activities that typically worked in four stages like these: Preparation: activate resources to deal with this particular type of problem. Incubation: generate many potential solutions. Revelation: recognize a promising one. Evaluation: verify that it actually works p.237<\/li>\n<li>However, it is much harder to both speak and write (or to listen and read) simultaneously, because both tasks will compete for the same language resources. I suspect such conflicts get even worse when you think about what you&#8217;re thinking about, because every such act will change what is in the context box that tries to keep track of what you were thinking about. p.248 <em>A good example comes when one read when thinking about something else. When the text is read again, one remember the words, but not having been conscious of their meaning. It seems a lot more improbable (impossible?) that this occurs while writting (requires too frequent &#8220;attentional checkpoints&#8221;).<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>Resourcefulness<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Aaron Sloman 1992: &#8220;The most important discoveries in science are not discoveries of new laws or theories, but the discovery of new ranges of possibilities, about which various laws or theories could be formulated. This deepens our knowledge of the &#8216;form&#8217; of the world, as opposed to its &#8216;contents&#8217; or its &#8216;constraints&#8217;-the laws.&#8221; p.278 <em>There might not be any &#8220;form&#8221; to be discovered though, but rather a new range of possibilities is made possible by sheding some new light on the subject of study.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>As Immanuel Kant pointed out long ago, learning to learn is one of the things that we cannot learn entirely from experience! p.294<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h4>The self<\/h4>\n<ul>\n<li>Why don&#8217;t we have words for trichotomies or trifferences? p.318<\/li>\n<li>But when you see the mind as a cloud of conflicting resources, then you no longer need to think of pleasure as a &#8220;basic&#8221; or all-or-none thing. For now you can imagine that, while some parts of your mind are uncomfortable, &#8216; other parts of your mind may enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them. For example, one part of your mind can still represent your state in a positive way, by saying, &#8220;Good, this is a chance to experience awkwardness and to discover new kinds of mistakes!&#8221; p.325<\/li>\n<li>In other words, it seems to me, the apparent &#8220;directness of experience&#8221; is an illusion that . comes because our higher mental levels have such limited access to the systems we use to recognize, represent, and react to our external and internal conditions. p.329<\/li>\n<li>As for terms like me, myself,\u00a0 and I these seem only to describe the times when we&#8217;re using our models of our minds. p.342 <em>But who is using these models? One of its subparts, although probably regulated by other intermediate resources. As a model of society, it has some definitive anarchist components&#8230;<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marvin Minsky Introduction Each of our major &#8220;emotional states&#8221; results from turning certain . resources on while turning certain others off-and thus changing some ways that our brains behave. p.4 Intersections between resources may explain why we may seem to be very different at times and yet never completely distincts (except for schizophrenia?). If a &#8230; <a title=\"The Emotion Machine\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=17821\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Emotion Machine\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[621],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17821"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22741,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821\/revisions\/22741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}