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.” Read more...

The best books on Identity and the Mind

Sebastian Seung, Medical Scientist