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How does the mind work? Marvin Minsky --
co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at
MIT and the best-known and most influential expert in his
field -- offers a revolutionary answer to that age-old question
in The Society of Mind, an authoritative and engaging
exploration of human intelligence.
To Minsky, the mind is a "society"
that arises out of every-smaller agents that are themselves
mindless. Mirroring the structure of this theory, The
Society of Mind has a bold and original format: it is
an intellectual puzzle that the reader -- whether specialist
or novice -- assembles along the way. Each section, a self-contained
page, corresponds to a single piece of the puzzle, and --
as in a mosaic -- a unified theory of mind emerges before
the reader's eyes.
The Society of Mind ranges from the
significance of children's drawings to the problem of self-knowledge,
from "the power of negative thinking" to the role
that humor plays in ordinary thought. Rich with illustrations,
visual and verbal, this book is more than a theory of how
the mind works; it is an adventure story for the imagination
that will provoke as well as delight the reader.
The definitive statement by the world's
leading authority, The Society of Mind will fascinate
everyone interested in the most basic mystery of philosophy,
psychology, and artificial intelligence -- the nature of
thought.
Marvin Minsky lives in a large house
in Brookline, Massachusetts, along with his pediatrician
wife, Gloria, various animals and, on occasion, their three
children. He does teaching and research at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he is the Donner Professor
of Science. A member of the National Academy of Sciences
and a former president of the American Association for Artificial
Intelligence, he was one of the pioneers of computer science,
involved in establishing the scientific foundations of three
important areas: the Mathematical Theory of Computation,
Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics. He was a founder
of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Logo Computer
Systems, Inc., and Thinking Machines, Incorporated, and
has been an advisor to such diverse groups as NASA, the
L-5 Society, and the National Dance Institute. Professor
Minsky has also been engaged in research on musical cognition
and physical optics. His main concern over the past decade
has been working out the foundations for the new conception
of human psychology presented in this book.
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