From his biography:
In 1985, Marvin published a book, "The Society of Mind," in which 270 interconnected one-page ideas reflect the structure of the theory itself. Each page either proposes one such mechanism to account for some psychological phenomena or addresses a problem introduced by some proposed solution of another page. In 2006, he published a sequel, "The Emotion Machine," which proposes theories that could account for human higher-level feelings, goals, emotions, and conscious thoughts in terms of multiple levels of processes, some of which can reflect on the others. By providing us with multiple different "ways to think," these processes could account for much of our uniquely human resourcefulness.
In other words, the sense of self is not necessarily the consequence of there actually being a discreet thing.
As I mentioned in an earlier post Marvin’s theories on the mind had a big influence on my interest in Buddhist philosophy, Anyway, this conversation took place in his living room in Brookline Massachusetts. Marvin is also an accomplished musician. I snuck 30 second or so of him playing the keyboard at the end. It is his wife’s voice you hear in the background.
Comments
It's cool you want to link to us! Glad you are enjoying what we have here. We plan to keep the posts coming...
Nice to hear Marvin again -- although I think if I was there I'd have the same argument that I was having with him 15 years ago -- which is that the anti-representa tional side of AI that he is angry at was not really about dispensing with mental representations , the point was to get better theories of what representation is and how it works.
And speaking of that, you may know David Chapman was one of the leaders of that movement and also a pretty serious Buddhist, now blogging up a storm in various places: meaningness.wordpress.com/
Long time... It did cross my mind, but I sorta felt it was off topic for the purpose of the blog. Anyway, from what I remember he doesn't think that those are actually better theories. But I am sure that was the bulk of the arguments you had with him
Thanks for the tip about Mike Chapman. I have read a bit of his stuff on line. Very thought provoking.
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