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