X-Message-Number: 4163
Date: Thu, 6 Apr 1995 22:26:52 -0700
From: John K Clark <>
Subject: Minsky on Ettinger

Some may not read SCI.CRYONICS so I thought I'd send this to
Cryonet . I was delighted to see the father of Artificial Intelligence 
call the father of Cryonics "one of my long time heroes" , and Minsky is 
not a man known for giving out a lot of compliments.
         
                                     John K Clark       

==============================================================================

Subject: Re: Minsky
From:  (Marvin Minsky)
Date: Mon, 3 Apr 1995 06:20:39 GMT
Message-ID: <>

In article <3lj87c$>  writes:

{I can't help saying what a pleasure it is to talk for the first time
to Ettinger, one of my long time heroes.}

... >might be able to  inspect parts or aspects of itself with other parts or
>aspects, hence could be "conscious" of itself in Minsky's sense. That is not
>the question or the problem. The question is what aspect of
>anatomy/physiology gives rise to the subjective condition, pleasure/pain
etc.
>(Of course Minsky is right that this fundamental question, among others, has
>been almost universally ignored until very recently.)

I do in fact have what looks like good theories of pleasure and pain.
I'm still trying to write them up properly.

>It is also possible that feeling may turn out to be an easier problem than
>some of the others in brain physiology--but it remains by far the most
>important one. Understanding feeling has enormous implications for all of
>psychology and philosophy and for the world views of people generally.

I don't think that feeling theories are easy, but I think I've found
some good ones.  I had a first draft of pleasure and pain theories in
_The Society of Mind_ page 37, but that was too simplified.  I can
only summarize very briefly: this will be several chapters in my new
book:


The pain system, with its hardware for detecting actual or approaching
injury, causes large changes in one's state of mind, the most
important of which is the active inhibition of the pursuit of long
range plans.  This leads to multiple activities on the parts of the
agencies pursuing those plans, but they are all frustrated by becoming
unable to make use of the resources reassigned to deal with the
immediate problem. If you try to describe how hurting "feels", you
should be able to reinterpret most of those descriptions into this
form...

Pleasure, I think is another thing, with some similarities. It is
involved with the system for learning (in the pleasure=reward sense).
What happens, I theorize, is that the machinery for setting up the
transfer to long term memory needs to simplify the situation so that
the wrong things aren't learned.  This involves a highly evolved
system which, among other things, shuts down competing activities (so
that you can't find good reasons not to keep doing whatever it is),
thus simplifying the credit-assignment problem.  Again, other
activities are suppressed, as with pain, but in this case, they don't
get to complain as much; that's because (I conjecture) the initial
phases of the transfer toDn long term memory require a more active
suppression which the learning system locates suitable "unused real
estate" for the learning.  (The brain is *not* a simple, big,
distributed network, and it needs a good deal of organization to learn
things without interfering with too many older records.)  Again, it is
not so obvious how to translate the usual descriptions of pleasure
into this interpretation: the trick is (surprise) to regard pleasure
as an almost entirely negative emotion: "I did not feel like doing
anything else," or "Nothing seemed nearly so good as this," etc.  I'll
distribute more details in a couple of months.

>Finally, I think philosophers create many of their own problems by torturing
>language. An example is the "paradox" of the Liar and related
>pseudo-problems. I think I'll separate this into another posting. Let me
just
>say here that I seem to go further than Minsky in rationalism/materialism; I
>do not believe that ANY areas of reality have (so far at least) been shown
to
>be beyond scientific investigation and potential understanding.

Not further, I think.  I agree that we can learn to escape the more
familiar 'paradoxes' -- but my point was that we don't normally do it
in technically adequate ways; instead we rely upon fast, convenient,
but frequently inconsistent commonsense thinking procedures.  (I was
arguing less with philosophers than with Penrose, who appears to
believe he has a mysterious 'inside track' to the truth--one that lies
beyond the customary limitations of materialism.  In particular, he
seems to believe that he (and others) have ways to determine the
outcome of computations that involve infinite conventional
calculations.  This is only a conjecture, however, and I have found
serious defects in each of his defenses of it.)

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=4163