Firing up the Emotion Machine

Marvin Minsky has passed on, to use a phrasing I feel pretty confident that he՚d dislike. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, so according to him there is nothing to pass on, no spirit to live on beyond the body. Let՚s just say his machinery gradually broke down, as they all do, and eventually ceased to function. He՚s rumored to have signed up for cryogenic preservation, for what that՚s worth, so there is the possibility of the machinery coming back into operating condition at some time in the future.

But whatever spirit animated him does live on, in the hacker culture that grew up around MIT and has since kind of taken over the world. Many people built that culture, but Marvin was at the core of the restless inquisitiveness, pragmatism, skepticism, and general disrespect of established institutions that characterizes it.

Everyone else who embodied this spirit gave their own twist to it, and perhaps Marvin՚s own special version is now lost until the digital resurrection. It almost doesn՚t matter. Marvin I think was somewhat disappointed, even bitter, in his later years, because the field he founded wasn՚t taking his ideas as seriously as he felt they deserved, and was going in directions he viewed as unpromising. If I could have had a last conversation with him, and felt presumptuous, I would tell him not to worry about any of that. The important part of who he was made it out into the world, embodied in the vast number of people he influenced.

And Marvin՚s own words and works live on. There՚s a collection of 150 or so video clips of him holding forth on the history of AI, his personal story, and the intellectual milieu he lived in and generated. His daughter Margaret assembled a beautiful web presentation of his paper Music, Mind, and Meaning. There is plenty of Marvin left in the world.

Marvin was brilliant in numerous ways, an accomplished inventor, mathematician, and musician aside from the work on artificial intelligence he is best known for. But his big trick was to face squarely the mechanical nature of the human mind and not be alarmed by it. Indeed, he found it rather delightful and intriguing. This put him at odds with standard-issue humanists, which suited him just fine. But Marvin himself was not in any way inhuman, far from it. He was an extremely warm and welcoming individual, and always willing to engage with anyone՚s open mind.

He was I suppose a reductionist, but to label him that is to reduce his own complicated way of thought to a single-word slogan. And that was one kind of reduction he did not practice. His other big trick was to know that there is no one big trick to the mind, that single-idea solutions like logic or bayesianism are insufficient, and that building a mind requires the complex orchestration of multiple mechanisms. Society of Mind was itself structured as a cooperating network of very specific ideas for mechanisms, making the form match its content. He was an extreme fox on the Isaiah Berlinfox/hedgehog scale (while John McCarthy, a co-founder of AI who was more fond of logical formalism, might be his counterpart hedgehog). So he tried to take intractable concepts like selves and consciousness and “reduce” them to a complex interaction between mechanisms:

“The idea that there is a central I that has experience is a typical case of taking a common sense concept and not realizing that it has no good technical counterpart, but it has 20 or 30 different meanings and you keep switching from one to the other without even knowing it, so it all seems like one thing…Consciousness seems very mysterious and unphysical if you don՚t know how it works, like when Houdini or Penn and Teller make an elephant disappear, then you say “this is not physical, it՚s impossible”. When you know how the magic trick works, the sense of wonder goes away, although you still might remember how it puzzled you once.”

His life could be seen as a battle against the idea that understanding how something worked in any way diminished it.

It was truly a privilege and a gift to learn from him. I was far from an ideal student, and went off in directions he didn՚t really approve of. I was consumed by the specifics of the notion of “agent” that he developed – a subpart of the mind with its own machinery, goals, and ability to act – and tried to understand exactly what agency consisted of, what it meant, how it was deployed as a metaphor in technical talk in general. When Marvin wrote a a follow-up book, the The Emotion Machine, he decided to drop the agent language in favor of the more neutral “resources”. I guess he was unhappy at how people inferred from the agent metaphor that these components were full-fledged minds with sophisticated reasoning and representations of their own, in which case the theory didn՚t really explain anything.

This may have been sound tactics but I think it was a strategic mistake. The question of what agency is and what machinery could underlie it is important, and lack of good ways to think about it is responsible for some of the confusion in current discourse around the idea of superempowered artificial intelligences.

Marvin was a mathematician (albeit a very nonstandard one) and mathematicians have the job of pulling eternal truths into the temporal processes of life, cognition, and scholarship. Computation itself – an idea that he helped define – is also a way of connecting the timeless and the temporal. His time to be active has come to an end, and you can look back on his life and see how he was a creature of his time, how he learned from the great minds of an earlier time, and how he passed on his knowledge to the generations that followed. All of whom had their own visions, colored by their own times, yet retaining and transmitting some fragments of what was learned from their teacher.

Time marches on and cuts us all down eventually, but some part of us is timeless. Not godlike or soullike, Marvin wouldn՚t have any of that, but perhaps there is some quasimathematical pattern that our mechanisms embody and that precedes us, outlives us, and connects us.

[More people remember Marvin. My own mentions of him over the years, here and on Ribbonfarm.]

Guest post: I and Thou and Life in Aspergerstan

I have a new guest post up at ribbonfarm, which turned out to be a conceptual salad of Martin Buber, cognitive psychology, the culture of Asperger's, and social media. As J.R. "Bob" Dobbs says, too much is always better than not enough.

Mental Music Machinery

(for Marvin Minsky)
[better audio]


I've been thinking a lot about music lately, trying to come up with a theory of catchiness. That is to say, despite my notable lack of actual musical talent or knowledge, I have a tendency to latch on to particular songs and replay them in my mind throughout the day, grooving to the best of my limited abilities. This doesn't make me any different from everyone else, but something about the way I grasp or don't grasp music makes it seem theoretically interesting. At least to me. What is going on in my head that these artifacts of pop culture should entrain and engross me?

The very difficulty of grasping music is part of its attractiveness. Music is or ought to be the paradigmatic case of embodied cognition. Musical knowledge (certainly the kind I have) is not so much representational as enactive. I don't "know" the tune, I couldn't write it down, but I can replay it. That is, I've built inside my head a little music machine, capable of recreating some of the structural elements of a song, all without knowing much about it in any symbolic sense. Over the years I've learned a few tricks, like ways to count beats, that I can use to produce a traditional symbolic representation of some aspects of music. but it's laborious and it has nothing to do with the way a catchy song catches. I don't "know" these songs in the sense that I know a fact, but in some other way.  What that way is is a bit of a mystery, but I envision as a little clanking machine I've cobbled together that is capable of crudely reproducing the core of a tune.

These machines generally are not purely mental; they tend to involve bodily movement (sometimes called "dancing" or "spazzing back and forth") and/or vocalization. In other words, I can't just replay them in my head; muscles need to be involved.

So once I get the core of a little music machine in my head, I enjoy letting it go, and sometimes it goes off on its own without me willing it (that is practically the definition of "catchy"). I envision it as a complex collection of roughly-built mechanisms, something like the mechanical sculptures you see in every public space these days, but more energetic and involved with itself, so maybe a cross between one of those and a Friden calculator, with a touch of Arthur Ganson. A rattling contraption at best, but fun to watch, to participate in.

There is a bootstrapping quality to learning one of these things, because repetition makes the machine work better. The cognitive slipperiness of the music contributes the the pleasurability of these repetitions, because (a) the act of repeating always seems like a bit of a feat, and (b) the results are always a bit of a surprise. This may be essential to catchiness, which (and here I'm getting into more music theory than I really know) tends to involve swing or other elements that play off a standard mechanical metric.

The things that seem catchy to me seem to be characterized by a strong rhythm and a certain way the lyrics snake through the beats in unexpected ways. There, now, as soon as I start to try to describe anything musically specific I get hopelessly tangled in the inadequacy of language. Actual musicians do have ways to talk about this stuff of course.

This train of thought was partly inspired by Marvin Minsky's essay Music, Mind and Meaning, which has a section entitled "Sonata as Teaching Machine". But where Minsky's theory is mostly structural, I'm trying to get at some other qualities of music besides its formal relationships.

Music's metric frames are transient templates used for momentary matching. Its rhythms are "synchronization pulses" used to match new phrases against old, the better to contrast them with differences and change. As differences and change are sensed, the rhythmic frames fade from our awareness. Their work is done and the messages of higher-level agents never speak of them; that is why metric music is not boring!

So I'm fully in sync with the first part of this idea, that one of the functions of rhythm is to provide a frame for comparing different things (phrases) in a common context. But he loses me on the second half, partly because we are talking about different types of music and different types of listening. In my type of music, the rhythm does not fade from consciousness but is ever-present, and the higher-level structures are maddeningly elusive.

Again, this might be a function of my idiosyncratic tastes (I am a rhythm guy; while I can appreciate other aspects of music like beautiful harmonies, they don't have this entrancing quality for me) and/or the primitive state of my musical abilities. I like to think that my ignorance may be a strength in thinking about this stuff. As to why I or anyone else should be interested, well, there is a sense in which musical entrainment may be at the core of human society. Maybe music is not some weird side effect of the human mind but something fundamental to what we are. And if so, my crude models of it may be getting at something more fundamental than those that employ sophisticated theory.

Personhood theory

I inserted myself in the middle of another fruitless debate, arguing against both sides. This one was primarily between Wesley J. Smith, a conservative bioethicist at the Discovery Institute (!), John Derbyshire, and Josh Rosenau over "human exceptionalism". My comments are here and here. A lot of hear and not much light, as usual. But it introduced to me a useful term, personhood theory. This is used by some bioethicists to describe the process of deciding who is or isn't a "person" under law and ethics. It makes sense to me that there should be such theories, although they may vary widely. For instance, I (and most sensible people) don't consider a 16-cell blastocyte to be a person, but many of the religious do.

But to Wesley Smith the very idea of "personhood theory" is anathema. He doesn't merely offer a competing definition of person, he regards the entire topic as an occasion for bluster and obfuscation. I can't quite understand why generally anti-science conservatives are wedded to the idea that it's 46 chromosomes that define a person.

The two main theories in play seem to be either genetic (the right-to-life conservative view) or based on some kind of cognitive quality such as self-awareness or language use). Smith's entire output seems devoted to warning that the latter criterion is perilous, leading us down a variety of slippery slopes to euthanasia, infanticide, and all manner of horrors. He's got a point, this stuff is very problematic. But throwing up hands and refusing to think about it does not strike me as a useful or interesting approach.

Marvin Minsky once proposed (jokingly, I think) that you aren't fully human until you can speak in sentences with subordinate clauses, which would allow infanticide up to age 3 or so.

It is obvious (to me at least) that "person" is a social construct. Some societies permit infanticide, others don't. The default for tribal societies seems to be to consider everyone outside of the tribe as somewhat less of a person than those within. The desire of conservatives for some kind of moral absolutism based on biology is doomed to failure, as is obvious from the glaring inconsistencies in their position. Given that, personhood theory should be a subject of intense interest.