Minsky’s Society of Mind

Marvin Minsky (2007), co-founder of MIT’s AI laboratory, argues that “our minds did not evolve to serve as instruments for observing themselves, but for solving such practical problems as nutrition, defense, and reproduction” (p. 109). He describes the mind as being composed of many partially autonomous “agents.” These agents self-organize to create a “society” of smaller minds. This is basically another way of viewing the brain as a complex adaptive system. Minsky views the functions of the brain as being performed by “thousands of different, specialized sub-systems.” He continues to explain that we can interpret “mental states” and “partial mental state” as subsets of the states of the parts of the mind. For example, certain divisions specialize in sensory processing, language, long-range planning, etc. Each “agent” is made up of multiple subspecialists that embody smaller elements of an individual’s knowledge, skills and methods. In an earlier work, Minsky (1980) explains that “no single one of these little agents knows very much by itself, but each recognized certain configurations of a few associates and responds by altering its state” (p. 119). This type of interrelationship among the components is characteristic of complex systems. He sees the construction of the mind as the synthesis of organization systems that can support a large enough diversity of different schemes, yet enable them to work together to exploit one another’s abilities. These agencies self-organize into larger conglomerates with the ability to perform more complex functions, and then these conglomerates combine to form higher and higher levels of self-organization and the emergence of the “abilities we attribute to minds.”

Later in his argument, Minsky (2007) claims that consciousness is “used mainly for the myth that human minds are ‘self-aware’ in the sense of perceiving what happens inside themselves” (p. 327). He believes that human consciousness can never truly represent what is happening at the present moment, but only a little of the recent past. He postulates that each “agency” has a limited capacity to represent what happened recently and the fact that it takes time for agencies to communicate with one another. Consciousness in a unique way follows the observer effect in physics; an attempt to examine temporary memories distorts the very records it is trying to inspect.

Minsky’s “society of mind” challenges the commonly accepted “single-self” concept, or the idea that there is a unitary being “inside us that does all the feeling or thinking for us (Wadhawan, 2010). Proponents claim that the “single-self” concept may be helpful and useful, but it not grounded in science. Minksy (2007) explains that unifying our idea of the mind can hide “how much we’re controlled by all sorts of conflicting unconscious goals” (p. 15). When trying to answer questions about ourselves, Minsky claims, “We are switching among a huge network of models which tries to represent some particular aspects of your mind” (p. 16). Even though we feel as if our brain represents a unified self, there are many different systems working within particular models we have created.

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Minsky's Full Text is available freely online - The Society of Mind