The Emotion Machine

Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

Marvin Minsky

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781416579304
• Topic: Sciences biologiques
• Subtopic: Science générale

In this mind-expanding book, scientific pioneer Marvin Minsky continues his groundbreaking research, offering a fascinating new model for how our minds work. He argues persuasively that emotions, intuitions, and feelings are not distinct things, but different ways of thinking. By examining these different forms of mind activity, Minsky says, we can explain why our thought sometimes takes the form of carefully reasoned analysis and at other times turns to emotion. He shows how our minds progress from simple, instinctive kinds of thought to more complex forms, such as consciousness or self-awareness. And he argues that because we tend to see our thinking as fragmented, we fail to appreciate what powerful thinkers we really are. Indeed, says Minsky, if thinking can be understood as the step-by-step process that it is, then we can build machines -- artificial intelligences -- that not only can assist with our thinking by thinking as we do but have the potential to be as conscious as we are. Eloquently written, The Emotion Machine is an intriguing look into a future where more powerful artificial intelligences await.

1

FALLING IN LOVE

1-1 Infatuation

“In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,

For they in thee a thousand errors note;

But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise.”

—Shakespeare

Many people find it absurd to think of a person as like a machine—so we often hear such statements as this:

Citizen: Of course machines can do useful things. We can make them add up huge columns of numbers or assemble cars in factories. But nothing made of mechanical stuff could ever have genuine feelings like love.

No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical ways—nor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness.

What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don’t really want to know more about? Hear our friend Charles attempt to describe his latest infatuation.

“I’ve just fallen in love with a wonderful person. I scarcely can think about anything else. My sweetheart is unbelievably perfect—of indescribable beauty, flawless character, and incredible intelligence. There is nothing I would not do for her.”

On the surface such statements seem positive; they’re all composed of superlatives. But note that there’s something strange about this: most of those phrases of positive praise use syllables like “un,” “less,” and “in”—which show that they really are negative statements describing the person who’s saying them!

Wonderful. Indescribable.

(I can’t figure out what attracts me to her.)

I scarcely can think of anything else.

(Most of my mind has stopped working.)

Unbelievably perfect. Incredible.

(No sensible person believes such things.)

She has a flawless character.

(I’ve abandoned my critical faculties.)

There is nothing I would not do for her.

(I’ve forsaken most of my usual goals.)

Our friend sees all this as positive. It makes him feel happy and more productive, and relieves his dejection and loneliness. But what if most of those pleasant effects result from his success at suppressing his thoughts about what his sweetheart actually says:

“Oh, Charles—a woman needs certain things. She needs to be loved, wanted, cherished, sought after, wooed, flattered, cosseted, pampered. She needs sympathy, affection, devotion, understanding, tenderness, infatuation, adulation, idolatry—that isn’t much to ask, is it, Charles?”¹

Thus, Love can make us disregard most defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishments—even when, as Shakespeare said, we still may be partly aware of them:

“When my love swears that she is made of truth,

I do believe her, though I know she lies.”

We are equally apt to deceive ourselves, not only in our personal lives but also when dealing with abstract ideas. There, too, we often close our eyes to conflicts and clashes between our beliefs. Listen to Richard Feynman’s words:

“That was the beginning and the idea seemed so obvious to me that I fell deeply in love with it. And, like falling in love with a woman, it is only possible if you don’t know too much about her, so you cannot see her faults. The faults will become apparent later, but after the love is strong enough to hold you to her. So, I was held to this theory, in spite of all the difficulties, by my youthful enthusiasm.”

—1966 Nobel Prize lecture

What does a lover actually love? That should be the person to whom you’re attached—but if your pleasure mainly results from suppressing your other questions and doubts, then you’re only in love with Love itself.

Citizen: So far, you have spoken only about what we call infatuation—sexual lust and extravagant passion. That leaves out most of the usual meanings of “love”—such as tenderness, trust, and companionship.

Indeed, once those short-lived attractions fade, they sometimes go on to be replaced by more enduring relationships, in which we exchange our own interests for those of the persons to whom we’re attached:

Love, n. That disposition or state of feeling with regard to a person which (arising from recognition of attractive qualities, from instincts of natural relationship, or from sympathy) manifests itself in solicitude for the welfare of the object, and usually also in delight in his or her presence and desire for his or her approval; warm affection, attachment.

—Oxford English Dictionary

Yet even this larger conception of Love is still too narrow to cover enough, because Love is a kind of suitcase-like word, which includes other kinds of attachments like these:

The love of a parent for a child.

A child’s affection for parents and friends.

The bonds that make lifelong companionships.

The connections of members to groups or their leaders.

We also apply that same word Love to our involvements with objects, feelings, ideas, and beliefs—and not only to ones that are sudden and brief, but also to bonds that increase through the years.

A convert’s adherence to doctrine or scripture.

A patriot’s allegiance to country or nation.

A scientist’s passion for finding new truths.

A mathematician’s devotion to proofs.

Why do we pack such dissimilar things into those single suitcase-words? As we’ll see in Section 1-3, each of our common “emotional” terms describes a variety of different processes. Thus we use the word Anger to abbreviate a diverse collection of mental states, some of which change our ways to perceive, so that innocent gestures get turned into threats—and thus make us more inclined to attack. Fear also affects the ways we react but makes us retreat from dangerous things (as well as from some that might please us too much).

Returning to the meanings of Love, one thing seems common to all those conditions: each leads us to think in different ways:

When a person you know has fallen in love, it’s almost as though someone new has emerged—a person who thinks in other ways, with altered goals and priorities. It’s almost as though a switch had been thrown and a different program has started to run.

This book is mainly filled with ideas about what could happen inside our brains to cause such great changes in how we think.

1-2 The Sea of Mental Mysteries

From time to time we think about how we try to manage our minds:

Why do I waste so much of my time?

What determines to whom I’m attracted?

Why do I have such strange fantasies?

Why do I find mathematics so hard?

Why am I afraid of heights and crowds?

What makes me addicted to exercise?

But we can’t hope to understand such things without adequate answers to questions like these:

What sorts of things are emotions and thoughts?

How do our minds build new ideas?

What are the bases for our beliefs?

How do we learn from experience?

How do we manage to reason and think?

In short, we all need better ideas about the ways in which we think. But whenever we start to think about that, we encounter yet more mysteries.

What is the nature of consciousness?

What are feelings and how do they work?

How do our brains imagine things?

How do our bodies relate to our minds?

What forms our values, goals, and ideals?

Now, everyone knows how Anger feels—or Pleasure, Sorrow, Joy, and Grief—yet we still know almost nothing about how those processes actually work. As Alexander Pope asks in his Essay on Man, are these things that we can hope to understand?

“Could he, whose rules the rapid comet bind,

Describe or fix one movement of his mind?

Who saw its fires here rise, and there descend,

Explain his own beginning, or his end?”

How did we manage to find out so much about atoms and oceans and planets and stars—yet so little about the mechanics of minds? Thus, Newton discovered just three simple laws that described the motions of all sorts of objects; Maxwell uncovered just four more laws that explained all electromagnetic events; then Einstein reduced all those and more into yet smaller formulas. All this came from the success of those physicists’ quest: to find simple explanations for things that seemed, at first, to be highly complex.

Then, why did the sciences of the mind make less progress in those same three centuries? I suspect that this was largely because most psychologists mimicked those physicists, by looking for equally compact solutions to questions about mental ...