The Emotion Machine

"Marvin Minsky is famous as one of the fathers of artificial intelligence. The Emotion Machine is a summation of his lifetime of thinking about how the brain works. It is written somewhat as a computer scientist but also as a philosopher and psychologist. He’s a brilliant thinker and a brilliant writer. Most people will not know that he actually started out as a neuroscientist. But he gave up on neuroscience, deciding that if he wanted to understand intelligence in his lifetime he had better not study the brain but try to construct it in computer models. This follows up on his previous book, The Society of Mind , in which he updates Freud. Freud thought that we can divide the mind into three parts – the id, the ego and the super ego. Minsky argues that we need many more divisions, maybe hundreds. He thinks about the mind as being the society of these hundreds of regions. And this book continues on that theme. But of course, what we’re interested in in neuroscience is not hundreds of regions but billions of neurons. The question is how we can bridge the gap between those two, and he addresses that question a little bit at the end. Neuroscience is driven by the hypothesis that we don’t need the soul to explain the mind. We don’t know if that hypothesis is true, but it is the working assumption of all neuroscientists. Ultimately, we can understand the mind as the functioning of material processes. That is the idea of materialism. It’s all physical processes. Or there is the idea of mechanism, that we are nothing more than very complicated machines and our parts are made out of neurons or molecules. I pretty much restrict myself to discussing neuroscience, except in the last chapter of my book when I discuss the possibility of uploading. Uploading is the idea that I can transfer my mind to a computer, and then live happily ever after as a computer simulation. Not even terrifying, but for most people just strange! It’s one of the possible routes to immortality that people are thinking about. I call this idea the most contemporary idea of heaven. In some religions, heaven is a place where our souls go after we die. Maybe it’s a pleasant park or something, but we are freed from our bodily existence and our minds somehow waft about – although in some traditions it’s not clear whether it is a purely spiritual existence or some form of reincarnation. The idea of uploading is that you are transferred from your body to a more ethereal form of existence, a simulation of electrical signals in a computer. I think about it as the modern nerd’s idea of heaven. Some people are afraid of uploading because they think of it as being like a brain in a vat – someone being locked up and unable to move around. But that’s limited thinking. Any society that was advanced enough to simulate a brain ought to be advanced enough to simulate the world around the brain. In fact, you could make that world much better than the world which we live in. You could also re-programme yourself to get rid of all of your bad habits and limitations. In that respect you can be a better version of yourself, which is why it’s like heaven. I want to emphasise that these are all fun dreams, but the real question is whether it can ever be possible. There are so many interesting philosophical and ethical implications to uploading, but I don’t see it happening in the near future so I don’t worry about them. I am more focused on how we can improve our brains, rather than how we can escape them."