🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3244@tank.uchicago.edu> cs_bob@gsbacd.uchicago.edu writes:
>
>This group looks like it needs a new controversy, so...
>
Apparently Bob Kohout regards Minsky-bashing as an appropriate source of
controversy.  Having put a fair amount of time into trying to make sense
of THE SOCIETY OF MIND, I would like to rise to his challenge (which he
probably expected me to do).  However, I think it is important to set a
few matters straight about Minsky's role in the AI community.

My first observation is that, while I do not travel around very much, I have
yet to encounter a gathering of AI practicioners who would come out and say
that they take Minsky seriously.  (At one site--which I shall leave unnamed
out of a sense of discretion--where I led a seminar, I was strongly urged not
to mention K-lines.  The most acceptable phrase I was told to use would be
"something that looks like K-lines.")  So if Bob is under the impression that
the AI community is now fanatically worshipping at Minsky's temple, he is quite
mistaken.  An interesting sign of this is that our most prestigious journal,
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, has not yet run a review of THE SOCIETY OF MIND.

This is about to change, hopefully.  The reason for my own intense study of
Minsky's book was to write that long-overdue review.  I do not think my editor
will mind if I share my final paragraphs with this bulletin board, because what
one gets out of a book is very dependent on the attitude one brings to that
book.  Therefore, I think it is important to dwell upon who a book like THE
SOCIETY OF MIND  should be approached.  Here is how I ended my review:

	The reader should next accept the fact that this book is more
	a source of QUESTIONS than of ANSWERS.  In PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW
	KEY, Susanne Langer wrote:

		The way a question is asked limits and disposes
		the ways in which any answer to it--right or
		wrong--may be given.

	Many of the questions which Turing first raised in 1950 became
	side-tracked with the pursuit of artificial intelligence as a
	concrete" discipline.  THE SOCIETY OF MIND is an effort to get
	the questions of artificial intelligence "back on track"--Turing's
	track, at least.

	Because the emphasis is on questions, rather than answers, the
	reader should also approach some of the more flamboyant declarations
	of this book with caution.  Often their intent is more to provoke
	than to inform.  (Maturana calls such sentences "triggering
	perturbations.")  For example, Minsky's theory about split brains,
	as articulated in Section 11.8, is at odds with certain results in
	the published literature.  [Added as a footnote:  I wish to thank
	Bob Kohout for pointing this out to me.]  Unfortunately, Minsky
	does not provide citations to either support or rebut his own
	point of view.  For better or for worse, he seems to have assumed
	that the interested reader will pursue such references on his own.

	Nevertheless, taken on its own terms, this is a very exciting
	book . . . perhaps the most exciting book ever to have been
	published on the subject of mind.  It is provocative in the
	questions it raises and challenging because it does not provide
	cut-and-dried answers to those questions.  Ultimately, it serves
	the most important function which any book may serve:  IT INSPIRES
	THE READER TO THINK ABOUT THESE MATTERS ON HIS OWN.  Such books
	are rare in ANY subject.  We should all be thankful that Marvin
	Minsky has been able to serve the discipline of artificial
	intelligence so well.
>
>Take for example, Marvin Minsky's recent claim in "The Society of Mind" 
>that "Mind is what brains do". This effectively reduces one of the greatest
>mysteries of human thought to a question which Minsky believes can be
>answered completely within his own field. Minsky's position is not only 
>arrogant and in violation of one of the very principles Minsky pushes at 
>us in  "Society of Mind" (namely, that we should be skeptical of simple 
>explanations); it also betrays a terrible ignorance of the nature and history
>of the philosophical question "What is Mind?" It seems to me that Minsky
>wishes to use AI to accomplish with Epistemology what Skinner tried to
>do to Psychology with Behaviorism. In both cases, we see an attempt to put
>a discipline of rational inquiry on a 'sound, scientific basis' by simply
>eliminating from consideration all of the problems which are not easily
>addressed empirically. 
>
In light of my opening remarks, I would claim that this paragraph is basically
a misreading of Minsky's text.  While I can appreciate that there are those who
would read "Mind is what brains do" as a gesture of arrogant reductionism, I do
not think the text of THE SOCIETY OF MIND supports that claim.  Rather, the
book asks us to go back to that question of just what it is that brains
ACTUALLY DO.  It is not so much a matter of ignoring what philosophers
have had to say about mind as it is an observation that if one gets too
immersed in the philosophy of mind, one might lose touch with how the brain
is actually contributing to human behavior.  All Minsky has done is to
introduce a new perspective for the consideration of those questions which
have occupied so many philosophers of past and present.  The fact of the matter
is that, after one has read Minsky, one can go back to Descartes, Berkeley,
Hume, Husserl, and Wittgenstein (to name a few) and reconsider their
observations, their hyptotheses, and their intellectual struggles.  Now how
many books do we read which encourage such a review of past accomplishments?

>I do not think that it is a coincidence that this same Marvin Minsky is
>also largely responsible for having derailed research into neural networks
>to the extent that one could fairly say he set the field back at least 10
>years.

This is an example of attributing far too much political power to Minsky.  The
greatest enemy of neural network research has always been inadequate computing
facilities . . . both powerful hardware and accommodating software
environments.  The Rosenblatt camp was "stuck in the bits" of extremely
clunky equipment.  They could raise the occasional spark, but they lacked
the facilities to turn it into fire.  Even today, with much more powerful
equipment, achievements remain disappointingly modest.
>
>I have also read accounts of Minsky himself admitting that he may have gone 
>a bit too far, that he saw himself as trying to counter a connectionist 
>hysteria, and that he didn't intend to kill it. This comes, of course,
>only after it is apparent that what we now call PDP isn't going to die
>an easy death. It's unfortunate that he is put in the position of having
>to defend himself for having misled so many people. I for one certainly
>don't intend to accuse him of that, not because I believe him for an instant,
>but because one really can't blame him if he managed to make fools of so
>many. One can only blame the fools.
>
I do not think it has ever been Minsky's intention to make fools of his
readers.  If anything, I fear that he expects too much of his readers:
He expects them to THINK OVER his provocations rather than swallow them
whole.  The fools are the ones who are not willing (or able) to allow Minsky
the respect of such thought.  Unfortunately, they also tend to have the loudest
voices.

>The fact is that Minsky succeeded because the large majority of AI researchers
>wanted Minsky to be right, not because he was.

What makes you think that Minsky succeeded?  Have you any idea what the level
of research activity is that is based on THE SOCIETY OF MIND?  I have already
given my visiting seminar anecdote.  As another metric, I would invite you to
look at the preliminary Technical Program for this year's IJCAI.  I think you
will find that there is NOT ONE paper which is, in any way, a product of
Minsky's "vision."  Minsky is currently spending more time at the MIT Media
Lab than at the AI Lab.  THERE I have seen some attempts to apply his work
to music, but it is still very early stuff.  It hardly constitutes a massive
wave of AI research!
>
>It seems to me the absolute absurdity to claim that self is an illusion,
>which is essentially what Minsky would have us believe.

I think this is again a misreading.  If you look in Minsky's glossary, he is
actually calling it "the myth that each of us contains SOME SPECIAL PART that
embodies the essence of the mind" (my emphasis).  It is not the "self" that is
the illusion, rather the belief that self is some distinct component of body.
I see nothing wrong with Minsky questioning this belief.

In retrospect, I think that Bob has reacted in a way consisted with Minsky's
intentions.  He has obviously not swallowed the contents whole.  He is clearly
giving a lot of thought to what Minsky actually wrote, and even
misinterpretation can count for serious thought.  I, for one, wish
more people were reading Minsky with Bob's intensity.