Society of Mind @ richardeward.com

Society of Mind
by Marvin Minsky
from Simon & Schuster

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

• Agents and Emergence before it was popular.
  This book by one of the most important pioneers in artificial intelligence was ahead of its time.
  It deals with a society of agents that interact with each other, organize into hierarchies and networks, and give rise to "emergent" properties (in Minsky's view, the mind).
  The ideas in this book were highly influential in artificial intelligence, computer science, the philosophy of mind, and psychology.
  The book may seem a "popular" exposition and it was geared, in a sense, to be so. However,... more info

• Simple agents and the human mind
  According to Marvin Minsky the mind is composed of a collection of simple objects, agents. Working together these agents creates our mind.
  Some might find this approach somewhat reductionist. However, in broad terms it lines up with my understanding of the mind. So this is ok for me. However, I think that there are many mysteries of the mind that we need to address.
  I.e. How can two agents, say sound and sight, bind together and give you an experience which includes both? And how do you really... more info

• Professor, where is your scientific rigor?
  This book is full of sweet tales cooked up in some guy's head. This is okay for Tom Clancy but absolutely dumb for an MIT professor (which the author is). The author never backs up his ideas with rigorous experiments/proof- Its just a pile of sweet-sounding personal opinions. If you like that and have no interest in scientific rigor; just a good story then its a great book. However, if you need to learn about REAL Artificial Intelligence, the mind and similar fields and how a good book in these fields are... more info

• Understanding how the mind works
  This is a very unusual book. 270 chapters of one page grouped under 30 headings. Minsky tries to figure out how the mind works, by splitting what it does in one page very interesting bits. The discipline of one subject per page is unusual but effective. The brain is recognised as enormously complicated, but not so complicated that nothing can be understood about it. In fact it can only be understood by understanding its many different bits. Minsky built the first "randomly wired neural network learning... more info

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