The Society of Mind. Marvin Minksy ISBN 0-671-60740-5 pg 65 6.10 Worlds out of Mind There is also a different and more sinister way to make the world seem orderly, in which the mind has merely found a way to simplify itself. This is what we must suspect whenever some idea seems to explain too much. Perhaps no problem was actually solved at all; instead, the mind has merely found some secondary pathway in the brain, through which one can mechanically dislodge each doubt and difference from its rightful place! This may be what happens in some of thse experiences that leave a person with a sense of revelation - in a state in which no doubts remain, or with a vision of astounding clarity - yet unable to recount any details. Some accident of mental stress has temporarily supressed the capacity to question, doubt, or probe. One remebers that no questions went unanswered but forgets that none were asked! One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry. When victims of these incidents become compelled to recapture them, their lives and personalities are sometimes permanently changed. Then others, seeing the radiance in their eyes and hearing of the glory to be found, are drawn to follow them. But to offer hospitality to paradox is like leaning toward a precipice. You can find out what it is like by falling in, but you may not be able to fall out again. Once contradiction finds a home, few minds can spurn the sense-destroying force of slogans like "all is one".
pg 67 6.12 Internal Communication The smaller two languages are, the harder it will be to translate between them. This is not because there are too many meanings, but because there are too few. The fewer things an agent does, the less likely that what another agent does will correspond to any of those things. And if two agents have nothing in common, no translation is conceivable. In the more familiar difficulty of translating between human languages, each word has many meanings, and the main problem is to narrow them down to something they share. But in the case of communication between unrelated agents, narrowing down cannot help if the agents have nothing in common from the start.
6.13 Self knowledge is dangerous. Sigmund Freud theorized that each person's growth is governed by unconscious needs to please, placate, oppose, or terminate our images of parental authority. If we recognize the influence of these old images, however, we might consider them too infantile or too unworthy to tolerate and seek to replace them with something better. But then what would we substitute for them - once we divested ourselves of all those ties to instinct and society? We'd each end up as instruments of even more capricious sorts of self-invented goals.
--- 6.14 Confusion When we recognize that we're confused, we begin to reflect on how our minds solve problems and engage the little we know about our strategies of thought. ... Paradoxically, it is smart to realize that one is confused - as opposed to being confused without knowing it. For that stimulates us to apply our intellect to altering or repairing the defective process. Yet we dislike and disparage the sense of confusion, not appreciating the quality of this recognition. However, once your [self-observer] makes you start to ask yourself "What was I really attempting to do?" you can exploit that as an opportunity to change your goals or change how you describe your situtation. That way, you can escape the distress of feeling trapped because there seem to be no adequate alternatives. The conscious experience of confusion can resemble pain; perhaps this is because of how they both impel us to discover ways to escape from a predicament. The difference is that confusion is directed against a person's own failing state of mind, whereas pain reflects exterior disturbances. In either case, internal processes must be demolished and rebuilt. Both confusion and pain have injurious effects when they lead us to abandon goals on larger scales than appropriate: "The entire subject makes me feel ill. Perhaps I should abandon the whole project, occupation, or relationship." But even such disrupting thoughts can serve as probes for finding other agencies that might be engaged for help.
9.4 Enjoying Discomfort "Do not become attached to the things you like, do not maintain aversion to the things you dislike. Sorrow, fear and bondage come from one's likes and dislikes." -Buddha Why do children enjoy the rides in amusement parks, knowing that they will be scared, even sick? Why do explorers endure suffering and pain - knowing that their very purpose will disperse onece they arrive? And what makes ordinary people work for years at jobs they hate, so that someday they will be able to - some seem to have forgotten what? There is more to motivation thatn immediate reward. When we succeed at anything, a lot goes on inside the mind. For example, we may be filled with feelings of accomplishment and pride, and feel impelled to show others what we've done and how. However, it is the fate of more ambitious intellects tht the sweetness of success will swiftly fade as other problems come to mind. That's good because most problems do not stand alone but are only smaller parts of larger problems. usually, after we solve a problem, our agensices return to some other, higher-level cause for discontent, only to lose themselves again in other subproblems. Nothing would get done if we succumbed to satisfaction. But what if a situation gets completely out of our control - and offers no conceivable escape from suffering? Then all we can do is try to construct some inner plan for tolerating it. One trick is to try to change our momentary goal - as when we say, "It's getting there that's all the fun." Another way is looking forward to some benefit to future Self: "I certainly shall learn from this." When that doesn't work, we can still resort to even more unselfish schemes: "Perhaps others may learn from my mistake." These kinds of complications make it impossible to invent good definitions for ordinary words like "pleasure" and "happiness." No small set of terms could suffice to express the many sorts of goals and wants that, in our minds, compete in different agencies and on different scales of time. It is no wonder that those popular theories about reward and punishment have never actually led to explaining higher forms of human learning - however well they've served for training animals. For in the early stages of acquiring any really new skill, a person must adopt at least a partly antipleasure attitude: "Good, this is a chance to experience awkwardness and to discover new kinds of mistakes!" It is the same for doing mathematics, climbing freezing mountain peaks, or playing pipe organs with one's feet: some parts of the mind find it horrible, while other parts enjoy forcing those parts to work for /them/. We seem to have no names for processes like these, though they must be among our most important ways to grow. None of this is to say that we can discard the concepts of pleasure and liking as we use them in everyday life. But we have to understand their roles in our psychology; they represent the end effects of complex ways to simplify.
28.2 Minsky... MAGNITUDE AND MARKETPLACE ... We turn to using quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things. This way, for better or worse, we often assign some magnitude or price to each alternative. That tactic helps to simplify our lives so much that virtually every social community works out its own communal measure-schemes -- lets call them currencies -- that let its people work and trade in harmony, even though each individual has somewhat different personal goals. The establishment of a currency can foster both competition and cooperation by providing us with peaceful ways to divide and apportion the things we have to share. But who can set prices on things like time or measure the values of comfort and love? What makes our mental marketplaces work so well when emotional states seem so hard to compare? One reason is that no matter how different those mental conditions seem,, they must all compete for certain limited resources -- such as space, time, and energy -- and these, to a rather large extent, are virtually interchangeable. For example, you'd end up with almost the same result whether you measure things in terms of food or time -- because it takes time to find food, and each amount of food helps you survive for some amount of time. Thus the value we place on each commodity constrains, to some extent, the values we'll assign to many other kinds of goods. Because there are so many such constraints, once a community sets up a currency, that currency takes on a life of its own, and soon we start to treat our "wealth" as though it were a genuine commodity, a real substance that we can use, save, lend or waste. ...
28.3 QUANTITY AND QUALITY ... Whenever we turn to measurements, we forfeit some uses of intellect. Currencies and magnitudes help us make comparisons only by concealing the differences among what they purport to represent. By their nature, quantitative descriptions are so one-dimensional and featureless that they cannot help but conceal the structures that give rise to them. This is inescapable, since any act that makes two different things comparable must do it by deflecting our attention from their differences. Numbers themselves are the greatest masters of diguise because they perfectly conceal all traces of their origins. Add five to eight to make thirteen, and tell that answer to a friend: thirteen will be all your friend can know, since no amount of ingenious thought can ever show that it came from adding five and eight! It's much the same way inside the head: quantitative judgements help us to make decisions only by keeping us from thinking too much about the actual evidence. ... Most of the properties of a currency are not inherent -- but merely conventional.
(notes:6-29-95)