Good article, and an improvement on common sense, but as a narrative as old as Plato and popular since Freud, I suspect that it’s at least somewhat anthropomorphic. (and ‘stop anthropomorphizing people’ is one of my core beliefs). Maybe you are a technical guy who uses reason to try to accomplish some of George’s goals and some goals opposed to him, but my guess is that ‘you’ and ‘I’ simply aren’t the same ‘agent’, in the Minsky sense, from minute to minute. Instead, ‘I’ am less like any of George’s team, and more like the movie itself, a bunch of snap-shots of non-representative bits of the lives of all of the members of the team and as a bunch of other people as well.
I think you’re using a “spotlight of attention” model, which supposes that consciousness is like a spotlight that sweeps over the contents of the mind, illuminating only one spot at a time, but shining on all of it at one time or another.
I’m invoking a “special teams” metaphor, which is that the conscious mind is brought to bear only on a subset of problem types, and there are some parts (possibly large parts) of the mind that the spotlight never shines on. But I didn’t present data to distinguish between these models; and in fact the cognitive architecture I described is more of a “spotlight of attention” model. (I think that’s because it represented only symbolic information, of the type that the conscious mind deals with.)
The post may be misleading. The spotlight may shine on all the parts we care about at one time or another; your goals may all be accessible to you (although the top-level values and goals may be read-only). But there’s a giant mass of subconscious learned skills and classifiers that you don’t have access to, and information flows from them back up into “your” part of the mind without your being aware of it. A better (and in some ways opposed) metaphor might be that you’re the president, but you have to implement everything by delegating it to a large bureaucracy.
Agreed that some parts never see the light, but with varied experience and practice you can get the light to shine onto a lot MORE parts than it might habitually shine onto.
How about whichever employee is in the president’s office is ‘the president’ and there is only room in the office for a few employees at a time so only upper management usually get in, but employees that never get in don’t improve their skills rapidly and loose morale.
I’d agree. For me the technical agent that fixes up social problems (using folk psychology) seems to be a different one that fixes up scientific problems (that is not to say that there are singular agents for both, but I can tell the difference between the two).
I can apply the scientific one to the social problems, but I feel less good when doing so and takes more time.
Good article, and an improvement on common sense, but as a narrative as old as Plato and popular since Freud, I suspect that it’s at least somewhat anthropomorphic. (and ‘stop anthropomorphizing people’ is one of my core beliefs). Maybe you are a technical guy who uses reason to try to accomplish some of George’s goals and some goals opposed to him, but my guess is that ‘you’ and ‘I’ simply aren’t the same ‘agent’, in the Minsky sense, from minute to minute. Instead, ‘I’ am less like any of George’s team, and more like the movie itself, a bunch of snap-shots of non-representative bits of the lives of all of the members of the team and as a bunch of other people as well.
I think you’re using a “spotlight of attention” model, which supposes that consciousness is like a spotlight that sweeps over the contents of the mind, illuminating only one spot at a time, but shining on all of it at one time or another.
I’m invoking a “special teams” metaphor, which is that the conscious mind is brought to bear only on a subset of problem types, and there are some parts (possibly large parts) of the mind that the spotlight never shines on. But I didn’t present data to distinguish between these models; and in fact the cognitive architecture I described is more of a “spotlight of attention” model. (I think that’s because it represented only symbolic information, of the type that the conscious mind deals with.)
The post may be misleading. The spotlight may shine on all the parts we care about at one time or another; your goals may all be accessible to you (although the top-level values and goals may be read-only). But there’s a giant mass of subconscious learned skills and classifiers that you don’t have access to, and information flows from them back up into “your” part of the mind without your being aware of it. A better (and in some ways opposed) metaphor might be that you’re the president, but you have to implement everything by delegating it to a large bureaucracy.
Agreed that some parts never see the light, but with varied experience and practice you can get the light to shine onto a lot MORE parts than it might habitually shine onto.
How about whichever employee is in the president’s office is ‘the president’ and there is only room in the office for a few employees at a time so only upper management usually get in, but employees that never get in don’t improve their skills rapidly and loose morale.
I’d agree. For me the technical agent that fixes up social problems (using folk psychology) seems to be a different one that fixes up scientific problems (that is not to say that there are singular agents for both, but I can tell the difference between the two).
I can apply the scientific one to the social problems, but I feel less good when doing so and takes more time.