MINSKY: ... Computer science is not really about computers at all, but about ways to describe processes. As soon as those computers appeared, this became an urgent need. Soon after that we recognized that this was also what we'd need to describe the processes that might be involved in human thinking, reasoning, memory, and pattern recognition, etc.

JB: You say 1950, but wouldn't this be preceded by the ideas floating around the Macy Conferences in the '40s?

MINSKY: Yes, indeed. Those new ideas were already starting to grow before computers created a more urgent need. Before programming languages, mathematicians such as Emil Post, Kurt Gödel, Alonzo Church, and Alan Turing already had many related ideas. In the 1940s these ideas began to spread, and the Macy Conference publications were the first to reach more of the technical public. In the same period, there were similar movements in psychology, as Sigmund Freud, Konrad Lorenz, Nikolaas Tinbergen, and Jean Piaget also tried to imagine advanced architectures for "mental computation." In the same period, in neurology, there were my own early mentors—Nicholas Rashevsky, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, Norbert Wiener, and their followers—and all those new ideas began to coalesce under the name "cybernetics." Unfortunately, that new domain was mainly dominated by continuous mathematics and feedback theory. This made cybernetics slow to evolve more symbolic computational viewpoints, and the new field of Artificial Intelligence headed off to develop distinctly different kinds of psychological models.

JB: Gregory Bateson once said to me that the cybernetic idea was the most important idea since Jesus Christ.

MINSKY: Well, surely it was extremely important in an evolutionary way. cybernetics developed many ideas that were powerful enough to challenge the religious and vitalistic traditions that had for so long protected us from changing how we viewed ourselves. These changes were so radical as to undermine cybernetics itself. So much so that the next generation of computational pioneers—the ones who aimed more purposefully toward Artificial Intelligence—set much of cybernetics aside.

The practicality of the alternative—finding useful mechanistic interpretations of those mentalistic notions that have real value—is associated in its most elementary forms with what we call cybernetics, and in its advanced forms with what we call artificial intelligence.

To be sure, [early cybernetics] had had their own intellectual ancestors, but here for the first time we see a sufficiently concrete (i.e., technical) foundation for the use of mentalistic language as a constructive and powerful tool for describing machines. It is ironic that these ideas descend more from the "idealistic" rather than from the "mechanistic" lines in metaphysical and psychological thought! For the mechanistic tradition was fatally dominated by the tightly limited stock of kinematic images that were available, and did not lead to models capable of adequate information processing. The idealists were better equipped (and more boldly prepared) to consider more sophisticated abstract structures and interactions, though they had no mechanical floor upon which to set them.

BERGSON: "Illusion!" You see? This is where we diverge irreconcilably. For you, duration is an illusion created by mechanisms. For me, duration is the most real thing—it's your mechanical snapshots that are the illusion, useful fictions we create for practical purposes.

MINSKY: [smiling] Maybe we're both right. Maybe "illusion" is the wrong word. Perhaps what I should say is: the mechanisms create something real that transcends them—a genuine experience of flow that exists at a higher level. The experience is real; I'm just trying to explain how it could arise from parts that don't themselves flow.

I think their disagreement would center on whether mechanism can explain lived experience, but they'd find common ground in rejecting passive models of mind and in recognizing that consciousness involves complex temporal relations rather than simple "awareness of the present moment."

The mind is a community of “agents”. Each has limited powers and can communicate only with certain others. The powers of mind emerge from their interactions for none of the Agents, by itself, has significant intelligence. [. . . ] Everyone knows what it feels like to be engaged in a conversation with oneself. In this book, we will develop the idea that these discussions really happen, and that the participants really “exist”. In our picture of the mind we will imagine many “sub-persons”, or “internal agents”, interacting with one another. Solving the simplest problem – seeing a picture – or remembering the experience of seeing it – might involve a dozen or more – perhaps very many more – of these agents playing different roles. Some of them bear useful knowledge, some of them bear strategies for dealing with other agents, some of them carry warnings or encouragements about how the work of others is proceding. And some of them are concerned with discipline, prohibiting or “censoring” others from thinking forbidden thoughts.

Note: This book uses the term "resource" where my earlier book, The Society of Mind, used "agent. "I made this change because too many readers assumed that an "agent" is a personlike thing (like a travel agent) that could operate independently, or cooperate with others in much the same ways that people do.

According to the modern scientific view, there is simply no room at all for "freedom of the human will". Everything that happens in our universe is either completely determined by what's already happend in the past or else depends, in part, on random chance...whatever actions we may "choose", they cannot make the slightest change in what might otherwise have been...

Whenever we find some scrap of order in the world, we have to attribute it to Cause—and whenever things seem to obey no laws at all, we attribute that to Chance. This means that the dominion controlled by Will can only hold what, up to now, we don't understand.

Does this mean that we must embrace the modern scientific view and put aside the ancient myth of voluntary choice? No. We can't do that: too much of what we think and do revolves around those old beliefs. Consider how our social lives depend upon the notion of responsibility and how little that idea would mean without our belief that personal actions are voluntary.

it's hard to know what to do with the word "exist"

you can't ever know that you exist, you might be a simulation.

its the [computational] process itself that is the real thing , it doesn't have to exist in any ordinary sense. "

I wouldn't use the word real at all, I think it's obsolete and unnecessary...to say that this button is real in this universe make sense, to ask if the universe itself is real makes no sense at all.

1995 is the centennial of the first good book on structural psychology, namely Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, which came out in 1895. It’s the first major work which discusses the mind as though there weren’t a single little homunculus or mastermind in the middle of it pulling the strings.

If you look at the later Freud a lot of people think that Freud must have studied emotions and emotional illnesses and disorders because that was the really hard and important problem, but Freud himself said the really hard thing to understand is how people do ordinary everyday non-neurotic reasoning.

The reason I suggested that he was a great AI researcher is that in trying to make this theory of how people’s motivations worked in this period 1895 and a couple years thereafter, he wrote this long essay, some of which is lost, for the Project for Scientific Psychology. The project wasn’t published until around 1950 by Carl Pribram, and it has little diagrams which are sort of neural network like, but more like the hydraulic motivation theory that later Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz won the Nobel Prize for, this diagram that is the foundation of modern ecological theory.

But the point is that Freud is an important figure because he’s the first one to consider that the mind is a big complicated kludge of different types of machinery which are specialized for different functions.

What is understanding? It seems to me that the problem that has happened in psychology on the whole and even in artificial intelligence, is that they’ve missed the lesson that Freud taught us, and I’m not saying that I’m a great admirer about the next 40 years of his research on psychosexual theories and so forth. I read a lot of that once but it seems to me that by 1905 Freud had produced a whole bunch of AI-like ideas that should have been followed up, but people got more interested in his theories of emotions and neuroses.

What is understanding? What I claim is that there isn’t any such thing. There is no such thing as consciousness...So what is there if there is no such thing as understanding? Here is a little paradox, it’s the reason that everybody in the philosophy business has gotten trapped into hopeless nonsense

The same thing with Penrose who says, “I don’t see any method by which a computer could be conscious, and so it must be...” – it’s like the real reason why people think that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare is that they look at these plays and they say that nobody could write well enough to write these plays, so it must have been someone else!

Computer science was the first way of talking that let you think about how complicated processes could go on. So, that’s what’s missing in these traditional philosophers like Penrose and Searle, they’re still using the ordinary, naive ideas like understanding and consciousness.

I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning... In particular, 1doubt that any logic that prohibits self-reference can be adequate for psychology: no mind can have enough power - without the power to think about Thinking itself. Without Self-Reference it would seem immeasurably harder to achieve Self-Consciousness -- which, so far as Ican see, requires at least some capacity ot reflect on what it does.

Since we have no systematic way to avoid all the inconsistencies of commonsense logic, each person must find his own way by building a private collection of "cognitive censors" to suppress the kinds of mistakes he has discovered in the past.

Suppressors (SOM 27.2)