Society of Mind

The society of mind- the theory that the mind is a "society" that arises out of ever-smaller agents that are themselves mindless.

Agents:

1. Agent- Any part or process of the mind that by itself is simple enough to understand--even though the interactions among groups of such agents may produce phenomena that are much harder to understand. An agent can be in one of two states--on or off.
2. The agents.
1. Censor- an agent that inhibits or suppresses the operation of other agents.
2. Demon- an agent that constantly watches for a certain condition and intervenes when it occurs.
3. Direction-neme- an agent associated with a particular direction or region in space. It's suspected that bundles of direction-memes are used inside our brains for representing many nonspatial concepts.
4. Memorizer- an agent that can treat an agency into some previously useful state.
5. Neme- an agent whose output represents a fragment of an idea or state of mind.
6. Pronome- a type of agent associated with a particular "rote" or aspect of a representation--corresponding, e.g., to the Actor, Trajectory, or Cause of some action.
7. Isonome- an agent that controls short-term memory in each of many agencies.
8. Paranome- an agent that operates on agencies of several different mental realms all at once, with similar effects on all of them.
9. Nome- an agent whose outputs affect an agency in some predetermined manner, such as a pronome, isonome, or paranome; an agent whose affect depends more on genetic architecture then on learning from experience.
10. Polyneme- an agent that arouses different activities, at the same time, in different agencies--as a result of learning from experience.
11. Recognizer- an agent that becomes active in response to a particular pattern of input signals.
12. Sensor- an agent whose inputs are sensitive to stimuli that come from the world outside the brain.
13. Society of more- the agents used by a mind to make comparisons of quantities.
14. Suppressor- a censorlike agent that works by disrupting a mental state that has already occured.
15. Difference-engine- an agency whose actions tend to make the present state of affairs more like some goal or "desired state" whose descriptions is represented in that agency.
3. Interactions of Agents.
1. Cross-exclusion - an arrangement in which each of several agents is connected so as to inhibit all the others--so that only one of them can remain active at a time.
2. Exploitation - the act of one agency making use of the activity of another agency, without understanding how it works.
3. Non-compromise principle - the idea that when two agencies conflict it may be better to ignore them both and yield control to yet another, independent agency.

Frames:

• Frame - your representation based on a set of terminals to which other structures can be attached. Normally, each terminal is connected to a default option, which is easily displaced by more specific information.
• Frame-array - a family of frames that share the same terminals. Information attached to any terminal with a frame-array automatically becomes available to all the frames of that array.
• Picture-frame- a type of frame whose terminals are controlled by direction-nemes.
• Trans-frame - a particular type of frame that is centered around the trajectory between two situations, one--for "before" and other for "after."
• Uniframe - a description designed to represent whichever common aspects of a group of things can be used to distinguish them from other things.

Concepts, theories and principles:

• Attachment learning- the theory that the presence of someone to whom we are emotionally attached has a special effect on how we learn, especially in infancy.
• Closing the ring- a technique by which an agency can recall many details of a memory from being given only a few "cues."
• Duplication problem- the question of how a mind could compare two similiar ideas without possessing two identical agencies for representing both of them at the same time.
• Exception principle- the concept that it may not pay to change a well-established skill in order to accomodate an exception.
• Grammar-tactic- an operation involved with speech that corresponds to a step in a process of construction a mental representation.
• Investment principle- the tendency of any well-developed skill to retard the growth of similiar skills because the latter works less well in their early forms--and hence are used so infrequently that they never reach maturity.
• K-line- the theory that certain kinds of memories are based on turning on sets of agents that reactivate one's previous partial mental state.
• Level-band- the idea that a typical mental process tends to operate, at each moment, only within a certain range or portion of the structure of each agency.
• Mental state- the condition of activity of a group of agents at a certain moment.
• Papert's principle- the hypothesis that many steps in mental growth are based less on the aquistion of new skills then building new administrative systems for managing already established abilities.
• Partial mental state- a description of the state of activity of some particular group of mental agents.
• Puzzle principle- the idea that any problem can be solved by trial and error--provided one already has some way to recognize a solution when one is found.
• Recursion principle- the idea that no society, however large, can overcome every limitation--unless it has some way to reuse the same agents, over and over again, for different purposes.
• Re-duplication theory of speech- Minsky's conjecture about what happens when a speaker explains an idea to a listener. A difference-engine-like process tries to construct a second copy of the idea's representation inside the speaker's mind. Each mental operation used in the course of that duplication process activates a corresponding grammar--tactic in the language--agency, and these lead to a stream of speech.
• Simulus- an illusion that a certain thing is present, caused by a process that evokes, at higher levels of the mind, a state resembling the state of mind that would be caused by that thing's actual presence.
• Time blinking- finding differences between two mental states by activating them in rapid succession and noticing which agents change their states. Time blinking might be one of the synchronized activities of brain cells that give rise to "brain waves." This method might avoid the duplication problem.
• Single-Agent Fallacy- the idea that a person's thought, will, decisions, and actions originate in some single center of control, instead of emerging from the activity of complex societies of processes.

Myths:

• Consciousness- human consciousness can never represents what is occuring at the present moment, but only a little of the recent past--partly because each agency has a limited capacity to represent what happened recently and partly because it takes time for agencies to communicate with one another.
• Creativity- myth that the production of novel ideas, artistic or otherwise, comes from some distinctive form of thought. 
• Intropection- myth that our minds possess the ability directly to perceive or apprehend their own operations.
• Intuition- myth that the mind possesses some immediate (and hence inexplicable) abilities to solve problems or perceive truths.
• Metaphor- myth that there is a clear distinction between representations that are "realistic" and those that are merely suggestive.
• Self- myth that each of us contains some special part that embodies the essence of the mind.
• Will- myth that human volition is based upon some third alternative to either causality or chance.

Source: Society of Mind (1986) by Marvin Minky.