Society of Mind: Fundamentals and Applications

By Fouad Sabry

What Is Society of Mind

Both the title of a book that was published in 1986 and the name of a theory of natural intelligence that was created and developed by Marvin Minsky are both referred to as "The Society of Mind."

How You Will Benefit

(I) Insights, and validations about the following topics:

Chapter 1: Society of Mind

Chapter 2: Marvin Minsky

Chapter 3: Cognitive Science

Chapter 4: Mind

Chapter 5: Connectionism

Chapter 6: Computational Theory of Mind

Chapter 7: Modularity of Mind

Chapter 8: Cognitive Neuroscience

Chapter 9: The Emotion Machine

Chapter 10: Philosophy of Mind

(II) Answering the public top questions about society of mind.

(III) Real world examples for the usage of society of mind in many fields.

(IV) 17 appendices to explain, briefly, 266 emerging technologies in each industry to have 360-degree full understanding of society of mind' technologies.

Who This Book Is For

Professionals, undergraduate and graduate students, enthusiasts, hobbyists, and those who want to go beyond basic knowledge or information for any kind of society of mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Billion Knowledgeable
• Release date: Jul 3, 2023

Book preview

Chapter 1: Society of Mind

The Society of Mind is both the title of a 1986 book and the name of a theory of natural intelligence as written and developed by Marvin Minsky.

The work, which first appeared in 1986, was the first comprehensive description of Minsky's society of mind theory, which he began developing in the early 1970s. It is composed of 270 self-contained essays which are divided into 30 general chapters. The book was also made into a CD-ROM version.

In the process of explaining the society of mind, Minsky introduces a wide range of ideas and concepts. He develops theories about how processes such as language, memory, and learning work, and also covers concepts such as consciousness, the sense of self, and free will; because of this, many view The Society of Mind as a work of philosophy.

The book was not written to prove anything specific about AI or cognitive science, and does not reference physical brain structures. Instead, it is a collection of ideas about how the mind and thinking work on the conceptual level.

Minsky first started developing the theory with Seymour Papert in the early 1970s. Minsky said that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks.

A core tenet of Minsky's philosophy is that minds are what brains do. The society of mind theory views the human mind and any other naturally evolved cognitive systems as a vast society of individually simple processes known as agents. These processes are the fundamental thinking entities from which minds are built, and together produce the many abilities we attribute to minds. The great power in viewing a mind as a society of agents, as opposed to the consequence of some basic principle or some simple formal system, is that different agents can be based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results.

This idea is perhaps best summarized by the following quote:

What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. —Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind, p. 308

{End Chapter 1}

Chapter 2: Marvin Minsky

Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts concerning AI and philosophy.

Minsky received many accolades and honors, including the 1969 Turing Award.

Marvin Lee Minsky was born in New York City, to an eye surgeon father, Henry, and to a mother, Fannie (Reiser), who was a Zionist activist. He was the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and professor of electrical engineering and computer science.

Minsky's inventions include the first head-mounted graphical display (1963)

In the early 1970s, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, Minsky and Papert started developing what came to be known as the Society of Mind theory. The theory attempts to explain how what we call intelligence could be a product of the interaction of non-intelligent parts. Minsky says that the biggest source of ideas about the theory came from his work in trying to create a machine that uses a robotic arm, a video camera, and a computer to build with children's blocks. In 1986, Minsky published The Society of Mind, a comprehensive book on the theory which, unlike most of his previously published work, was written for the general public.

The MA-3 Robotic Manipulator Arm, on display at MIT Museum

General view

the Belgrade Hand

In November 2006, Minsky published The Emotion Machine, a book that critiques many popular theories of how human minds work and suggests alternative theories, often replacing simple ideas with more complex ones. Recent drafts of the book are freely available from his webpage.

Minsky was an adviser Minsky is mentioned explicitly in Arthur C. Clarke's derivative novel of the same name, where he is portrayed as achieving a crucial break-through in artificial intelligence in the then-future 1980s, paving the way for HAL 9000 in the early 21st century:

In the 1980s, Minsky and Good had shown how artificial neural networks could be generated automatically—self replicated—in accordance with any arbitrary learning program. Artificial brains could be grown by a process strikingly analogous to the development of a human brain. In any given case, the precise details would never be known, and even if they were, they would be millions of times too complex for human understanding.

In Fargo Season 3 episode 3 (titled The Law of Non-Contradiction), at least two allusions are made to Minsky. The first, through the depiction of a useless machine: a device that was invented by Minsky as a philosophical joke. The second, through the depiction of an animation of a robot called minsky - a character in a sci-fi novel called The Planet Wyh.

In 1952, Minsky married pediatrician Gloria Rudisch; together they had three children. who published musings on the relations between music and psychology.

Minsky was an atheist.

Minsky received a $100,000 research grant from Jeffrey Epstein in 2002, four years before Epstein's first arrest for sex offenses; it was the first from Epstein to MIT. Minsky received no further research grants from him.

In January 2016 Minsky died of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 88.

1967 – Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, Prentice-Hall

1986 – The Society of Mind

2006 – The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

Minsky won the Turing Award (the greatest distinction in computer science)

Minsky was affiliated with the following organizations:

United States National Academy of Engineering

United States National Academy of Sciences

Extropy Institute's Council of Advisors

Alcor Life Extension Foundation's Scientific Advisory Board

kynamatrix Research Network's Board of Directors

Future Fantastic (1996)

Machine Dreams (1988)

{End Chapter 2}

Chapter 3: Cognitive science

The fields of linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology all contribute to the multidisciplinary field of cognitive science, which is the scientific study of the mind and the activities that occur within it.

The study of cognitive science aims to comprehend and explicate the fundamentals of intelligence in the expectation that doing so would result in a deeper insight into both the workings of the mind and the process of education. The 1950s saw the beginning of an intellectual movement that came to be known as the cognitive revolution, which led to the development of the cognitive sciences.

In the 1950s, an intellectual movement that came to be known as the cognitive revolution laid the groundwork for what is now known as the cognitive sciences. Plato's Meno and Aristotle's De Anima are two examples of ancient Greek philosophical texts that can be used to trace the origins of cognitive science. Many modern philosophers, including Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Cabanis, Leibniz, and John Locke, rejected scholasticism despite the fact that most of them had never read Aristotle, and they were working with an entirely.

Early cyberneticists in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who attempted to comprehend the organizing principles of the mind are considered the forefathers of the present culture of cognitive science. This culture may be traced back to the early cyberneticists. McCulloch and Pitts constructed the earliest forms of what are now known as artificial neural networks, which are models of computation influenced by the structure of biological brain networks. McCulloch and Pitts' work is credited with laying the groundwork for the field of artificial neural networks.

The early development of the theory of computation and the digital computer in the 1940s and 1950s was another factor that contributed to