Marvin Minsky's and Daniel Dennett's latest thoughts about the brain will blow your mind

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 04:07:17 GMT

clipped by: lionelster

In The Emotion Machine, you argue that feelings result from switching on or off certain "mental resources."
Minsky: The traditional view of emotions is that they are something extra, like adding color to a black-and-white photograph. But to me, emotions are what happens when you remove other resources. Anger means you've turned off your social graces, you've turned off your cautiousness, you've turned off your long-range plans and most of your ambition, and you've turned on things that make you act more rapidly and less deeply. Recognizing this complexity adds dignity to the theory.
Dennett: Computer programmers have the luxury to create hierarchies of control. The systems, the subsystems, the sub-sub-subsystems are complete slaves. They never rebel. This gives you a model of the mind with the highest echelons of logic at the top. But if you think about a brain as a community of individually semiautonomous, even independently evolved agencies, as Marvin has, you realize that the agencies have to be browbeaten and they have to form alliances. Emotions aren't an add-on but rather the politics of the whole system.

Tags: neuroscience, brain, emotion

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Marvin Minsky's and Daniel Dennett's latest thoughts about the brain will blow your mind