The Society of Mind (Marvin Minsky, 1990)
What is life? One dissects a body but finds no life inside. What is Mind?
One dissects a brain but finds no mind therein. Are life and mind so
much more than the "sum of their parts" that it is useless to search for
them? To answer that, consider this parody of a conversation between a
Holist and an ordinary Citizen.
Holist: I'll prove no box can hold a mouse. A box is
made by nailing six boards together. But it's obvious that no box can
hold a mouse unless it has some "mouse-tightness" or "containment". Now,
no single board contains any containment, since the mouse can just walk
away from it. And if there is no containment in one board, there can't
be any in six boards. So the box can have no mousetightness at all.
Theroetically, then, the mouse can escape!
Citizen: Amazing. Then what
does keep a mouse in a box?
Holist: Oh, simple. Even though it has no real
mousetightness, a good box can "simulate" it so well that the mouse is
fooled and can't figure out how to escape.
What, then, keeps the mouse confined? Of course, it is the way a box
prevents motion in all directions, because each board bars escape in a
certain direction. The left side keeps the mouse from going left, the
right from going right, the top keeps it from leaping out, and so on. The
secret of a box is simply in how the boards are arranged to prevent motion
in all directions! That's what containing means. So it's
silly to expect any separate board by itself to contain any
containment. even though each contributes to the containing. It is
like the cards of a straight flush in poker: only the full hand has any
value at all.
The same applies to words like life and mind. It is foolish
to use these words for describing the smallest components of living things
because these words were invented to describe how larger assemblies
interact. Like boxing-in, words like living and
thinking are useful for describing phenomena that result from
certain combinations of relationships. The reason box seems
nonmysterious is that everyone understands how the boards of a well-made
box interact to prevent motion in any direction. In fact, the word
life has already lost most of its mystery - at least fro modern
biologists, because they understand so many of the important interactions
among the chemicals in cells. But mind still holds its mystery -
because we still know so little about how mental agents interact to
accomplish all the things they do.
- Marvin Minsky (1990), "The Society of Mind", MIT Press, pp. 29.
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