Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a "society" of tiny components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter on a self-contained page corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amusing, and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination.
Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a "society" of tiny components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter on a self-contained page corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amusing, and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination.
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Overview
Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a "society" of tiny components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter on a self-contained page corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amusing, and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780671657130 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date: | 03/15/1988 |
Series: | Touchstone Book |
Pages: | 336 |
Sales rank: | 300,366 |
Product dimensions: | 8.50(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Professor Minsky is one of the pioneers of intelligence-based robotics. He designed and built some of the first mechanical hands with tactile sensors, visual scanners, and their software and interfaces. In 1951 he built the first neural-network learning machine. With John McCarthy he founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959. He has written seminal papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, perception, and language. His book The Society of Mind contains hundreds of ideas about the mind, many of which he has further developed in this book.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PROLOGUE
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
This book tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from nonintelligence? To answer that, we'll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.
I'll call "Society of Mind" this scheme in which each mind is made of many smaller processes. These we'll call agents. Each mental agent by itself can only do some simple thing that needs no mind or thought at all. Yet when we join these agents in societies in certain very special ways this leads to true intelligence.
There's nothing very technical in this book. It, too, is a society of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of them we can explain the strangest mysteries of mind.
One trouble is that these ideas have lots of cross-connections. My explanations rarely go in neat, straight lines from start to end. I wish I could have lined them up so that you could climb straight to the top, by mental stair-steps, one by one. Instead they're tied in tangled webs.
Perhaps the fault is actually mine, for failing to find a tidy base of neatly ordered principles. But I'm inclined to lay the blame upon the nature of the mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. If so, that complication can't be helped; it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.
What can we do when things are hard to describe? We start by sketching out the roughest shapes to serve as scaffolds for the rest; it doesn't matter very much if some of those forms turn out partially wrong. Next, draw details to give these skeletons more lifelike flesh. Last, in the final filling-in, discard whichever first ideas no longer fit.
That's what we do in real life, with puzzles that seem very hard. It's much the same for shattered pots as for the cogs of great machines. Until you've seen some of the rest, you can't make sense of any part.
1.1 THE AGENTS OF THE MIND
Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billion years in which our brains have evolved; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of infancy and childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
To explain the mind, we have to show how minds are built from mindless stuff, from parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we'd consider smart. Unless we can explain the mind in terms of things that have no thoughts or feelings of their own, we'll only have gone around in a circle. But what could those simpler particles be the "agents" that compose our minds? This is the subject of our book, and knowing this, let's see our task. There are many questions to answer.
Function: How do agents work?
Embodiment: What are they made of?
Interaction: How do they communicate?
Origins: Where do the first agents come from?
Heredity: Are we all born with the same agents?
Learning: How do we make new agents and change old ones?
Character: What are the most important kinds of agents?
Authority: What happens when agents disagree?
Intention: How could such networks want or wish?
Competence: How can groups of agents do what separate agents cannot do?
Selfness: What gives them unity or personality?
Meaning: How could they understand anything?
Sensibility: How could they have feelings and emotions?
Awareness: How could they be conscious or self-aware?
How could a theory of the mind explain so many things, when every separate question seems too hard to answer by itself? These questions all seem difficult, indeed, when we sever each one's connections to the other ones. But once we see the mind as a society of agents, each answer will illuminate the rest.
1.2 THE MIND AND THE BRAIN
It was never supposed [the poet Imlac said] that cogitation is inherent in matter, or that every particle is a thinking being. Yet if any part of matter be devoid of thought, what part can we suppose to think? Matter can differ from matter only in form, bulk, density, motion and direction of motion: to which of these, however varied or combined, can consciousness be annexed? To be round or square, to be solid or fluid, to be great or little, to be moved slowly, or swiftly one way or another, are modes of material existence, all equally alien from the nature of cogitation. If matter be once without thought, it can only be made to think by some new modification, but all the modifications which it can admit are equally unconnected with cogitative powers.
Samuel Johnson
How could solid-seeming brains support such ghostly things as thoughts? This question troubled many thinkers of the past. The world of thoughts and the world of things appeared to be too far apart to interact in any way. So long as thoughts seemed so utterly different from everything else, there seemed to be no place to start.
A few centuries ago it seemed equally impossible to explain Life, because living things appeared to be so different from anything else. Plants seemed to grow from nothing. Animals could move and learn. Both could reproduce themselves while nothing else could do such things. But then that awesome gap began to close. Every living thing was found to be composed of smaller cells, and cells turned out to be composed of complex but comprehensible chemicals. Soon it was found that plants did not create any substance at all but simply extracted most of their material from gases in the air. Mysteriously pulsing hearts turned out to be no more than mechanical pumps, composed of networks of muscle cells. But it was not until the present century that John yon Neumann showed theoretically how cell-machines could reproduce while, almost independently, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered how each cell actually makes copies of its own hereditary code. No longer does an educated person have to seek any special, vital force to animate each living thing.
Similarly, a century ago, we had essentially no way to start to explain how thinking works. Then psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget produced their theories about child development. Somewhat later, on the mechanical side, mathematicians like Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing began to reveal the hitherto unknown range of what machines could be made to do. These two streams of thought began to merge only in the 1940s, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts began to show how machines might be made to see, reason, and remember. Research in the modern science of Artificial Intelligence started only in the 1950s, stimulated by the invention of modern computers. This inspired a flood of new ideas about how machines could do what only minds had done previously.
Most people still believe that no machine could ever be conscious, or feel ambition, jealousy, humor, or have any other mental life-experience. To be sure, we are still far from being able to create machines that do all the things people do. But this only means that we need better theories about how thinking works. This book will show how the tiny machines that we'll call "agents of the mind" could be the long sought "particles" that those theories need.
1.3 THE SOCIETY OF MIND
You know that everything you think and do is thought and done by you. But what's a "you"? What kinds of smaller entities cooperate inside your mind to do your work? To start to see how minds are like societies, try this: pick up a cup of tea!
Your GRASPING agents want to keep hold of the cup.
Your BALANCING agents want to keep the tea from spilling out.
Your THIRST agents want you to drink the tea.
Your MOVING agents want to get the cup to your lips.
Yet none of these consume your mind as you roam about the room talking to your friends. You scarcely think at all about Balance; Balance has no concern with Grasp; Grasp has no interest in Thirst; and Thirst is not involved with your social problems. Why not? Because they can depend on one another. If each does its own little job, the really big job will get done by all of them together: drinking tea.
How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be at least a hundred of them, just to shape your wrist and palm and hand. Another thousand muscle systems must work to manage all the moving bones and joints that make your body walk around. And to keep everything in balance, each of those processes has to communicate with some of the others. What if you stumble and start to fall? Then many other processes quickly try to get things straight. Some of them are concerned with how you lean and where you place your feet. Others are occupied with what to do about the tea: you wouldn't want to burn your own hand, but neither would you want to scald someone else. You need ways to make quick decisions.
All this happens while you talk, and none of it appears to need much thought. But when you come to think of it, neither does your talk itself. What kinds of agents choose your words so that you can express the things you mean? How do those words get arranged into phrases and sentences, each connected to the next? What agencies inside your mind keep track of all the things you've said and, also, whom you've said them to? How foolish it can make you feel when you repeat unless you're sure your audience is new.
We're always doing several things at once, like planning and walking and talking, and this all seems so natural that we take it for granted. But these processes actually involve more machinery than anyone can understand all at once. So, in the next few sections of this book, we'll focus on just one ordinary activity making things with children's building-blocks. First we'll break this process into smaller parts, and then we'll see how each of them relates to all the other parts.
In doing this, we'll try to imitate how Galileo and Newton learned so much by studying the simplest kinds of pendulums and weights, mirrors and prisms. Our study of how to build with blocks will be like focusing a microscope on the simplest objects we can find, to open up a great and unexpected universe. It is the same reason why so many biologists today devote more attention to tiny germs and viruses than to magnificent lions and tigers. For me and a whole generation of students, the world of work with children's blocks has been the prism and the pendulum for studying intelligence.
In science, one can learn the most by studying what seems the least.
1.4 THE WORLD OF BLOCKS
Imagine a child playing with blocks, and imagine that this child's mind contains a host of smaller minds. Call them mental agents. Right now, an agent called Builder is in control. Builder's specialty, is making towers from blocks.
Our child likes to watch a tower grow as each new block is placed on top. But building a tower is too complicated a job for any single, simple agent, so Builder has to ask for help from several other agents:
In fact, even to find another block and place it on the tower top is too big for a job for any single agent. So Add, in turn, must call for other agents' help. Before we're done, we'll need more agents than would fit in any diagram.
Why break things into such small parts? Because minds, like towers, are made that way except that they're composed of processes instead of blocks. And if making stacks of blocks seems insignificant remember that you didn't always feel that way. When first you found some building toys in early childhood, you probably spent joyful weeks of learning what to do with them. If such toys now seem relatively dull, then you must ask yourself how you have changed. Before you turned to more ambitious things, it once seemed strange and wonderful to be able to build a tower or a house of blocks. Yet, though all grown-up persons know how to do such things, no one understands how we learn to do them! And that is what will concern us here. To pile up blocks into heaps and rows: these are skills each of us learned so long ago that we can't remember learning them at all. Now they seem mere common sense and that's what makes psychology hard. This forgetfulness, the amnesia of infancy, makes us assume that all our wonderful abilities were always there inside our minds, and we never stop to ask ourselves how they began and grew.
1.5 COMMON SENSE
You cannot think about thinking, without thinking about thinking about something.
Seymour Papert
We found a way to make our tower builder out of parts. But Builder is really far from done. To build a simple stack of blocks, our child's agents must accomplish all these other things.
See must recognize its blocks, whatever their color, size, and place in spite of different backgrounds, shades, and lights, and even when they're partially obscured by other things.
Then, once that's done, Move has to guide the arm and hand through complicated paths in space, yet never strike the tower's top or hit the child's face.
And think how foolish it would seem, if Find were to see, and Grasp were to grasp, a block supporting the tower top!
When we look closely at these requirements, we find a bewildering world of complicated questions. For example, how could Find determine which blocks are still available for use? It would have to "understand" the scene in terms of what it is trying to do. This means that we'll need theories both about what it means to understand and about how a machine could have a goal. Consider all the practical judgments that an actual Builder would have to make. It would have to decide whether there are enough blocks to accomplish its goal and whether they are strong and wide enough to support the others that will be placed on them.
What if the tower starts to sway? A real builder must guess the cause. It is because some joint inside the column isn't square enough? Is the foundation insecure, or is the tower too tall for its width? Perhaps it is only because the last block was placed too roughly.
All children learn about such things, but we rarely ever think about them in our later years. By the time we are adults we regard all of this to be simple "common sense." But that deceptive pair of words conceals almost countless different skills.
Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
If common sense is so diverse and intricate, what makes it seem so obvious and natural? This illusion of simplicity comes from losing touch with what happened during infancy, when we formed our first abilities. As each new group of skills matures, we build more layers on top of them. As time goes on, the layers below become increasingly remote until, when we try to speak of them in later life, we find ourselves with little more to say than "I don't know."
1.6 AGENTS AND AGENCIES
We want to explain intelligence as a combination of simpler things. This means that we must be sure to check, at every step, that none of our agents is, itself, intelligent. Otherwise, our theory would end up resembling the nineteenth-century "chessplaying machine" that was exposed by Edgar Allan Poe to actually conceal a human dwarf inside. Accordingly, whenever we find that an agent has to do anything complicated, we'll replace it with a subsociety of agents that do simpler things. Because of this, the reader must be prepared to feel a certain sense of loss. When we break things down to their smallest parts, they'll each seem dry as dust at first, as though some essence has been lost.
For example, we've seen how to construct a tower-building skill by making Builder from little parts like Find and Get. Now, where does its "knowing-how-to-build" reside when, clearly, it is not in any part and yet those parts are all that Builder is? The answer: It is not enough to explain only what each separate agent does. We must also understand how those parts are interrelated that is, how groups of agents can accomplish things.
Accordingly, each step in this book uses two different ways to think about agents. If you were to watch Builder work, from the outside, with no idea of how it works inside, you'd have the impression that it knows how to build towers. But if you could see Builder from the inside, you'd surely find no knowledge there. You would see nothing more than a few switches, arranged in various ways to turn each other on and off. Does Builder "really know" how to build towers? The answer depends on how you look at it. Let's use two different words, "agent" and "agency," to say why Builder seems to lead a double life. As agency, it seems to know its job. As agent, it cannot know anything at all.
When you drive a car, you regard the steering wheel as an agency that you can use to change the car's direction. You don't care how it works. But when something goes wrong with the steering, and you want to understand what's happening, it's better to regard the steering wheel as just one agent in a larger agency: it turns a shaft that turns a gear to pull a rod that shifts the axle of a wheel. Of course, one doesn't always want to take this microscopic view; if you kept all those details in mind while driving, you might crash because it took too long to figure out which way to turn the wheel. Knowing how is not the same as knowing why. In this book, we'll always be switching between agents and agencies because, depending on our purposes, we'll have to use different viewpoints and kinds of descriptions.
Copyright © 1985, 1986 by Marvin Minsky
Table of Contents
CONTENTS1 PROLOGUE
1.1 THE AGENTS OF THE MIND
1.2 THE MIND AND THE BRAIN
1.3 THE SOCIETY OF MIND
1.4 THE WORLD OF BLOCKS
1.5 COMMON SENSE
1.6 AGENTS AND AGENCIES
2 WHOLES AND PARTS
2.1 COMPONENTS AND CONNECTIONS
2.2 NOVELISTS AND REDUCTIONISTS
2.3 PARTS AND WHOLES
2.4 HOLES AND PARTS
2.5 EASY THINGS ARE HARD
2.6 ARE PEOPLE MACHINES?
3 CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE
3.1 CONFLICT
3.2 NONCOMPROMISE
3.3 HIERARCHIES
3.4 HETERARCHIES
3.5 DESTRUCTIVENESS
3.6 PAIN AND PLEASURE SIMPLIFIED
4 THE SELF
4.1 THE SELF
4.2 ONE SELF OR MANY?
4.3 THE SOUL
4.4 THE CONSERVATIVE SELF
4.5 EXPLOITATION
4.6 SELF-CONTROL
4.7 LONG-RANGE PLANS
4.8 IDEALS
5 INDIVIDUALITY
5.1 CIRCULAR CAUSALITY
5.2 UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS
5.3 THE REMOTE-CONTROL SELF
5.4 PERSONAL IDENTITY
5.5 FASHION AND STYLE
5.6 TRAITS
5.7 PERMANENT IDENTITY
6 INSIGHT AND INTROSPECTION
6.1 CONSCIOUSNESS
6.2 SIGNALS AND SIGNS
6.3 THOUGHT-EXPERIMENTS
6.4 B-BRAINS
6.5 FROZEN REFLECTION
6.6 MOMENTARY MENTAL TIME
6.7 THE CAUSAL NOW
6.8 THINKING WITHOUT THINKING
6.9 HEADS IN THE CLOUDS
6.10 WORLDS OUT OF MIND
6.11 IN-SIGHT
6.12 INTERNAL COMMUNICATION
6.13 SELF-KNOWLEDGE IS DANGEROUS
6.14 CONFUSION
7 PROBLEMS AND GOALS
7.1 INTELLIGENCE
7.2 UNCOMMON SENSE
7.3 THE PUZZLE PRINCIPLE
7.4 PROBLEM SOLVING
7.5 LEARNING AND MEMORY
7.6 REINFORCEMENT AND REWARD
7.7 LOCAL RESPONSIBILITY
7.8 DIFFERENCE-ENGINES
7.9 INTENTIONS
7.10 GENIUS
8 A THEORY OF MEMORY
8.1 K-LINES: A THEORY OF MEMORY
8.2 RE-MEMBERING
8.3 MENTAL STATES AND DISPOSITIONS
8.4 PARTIAL MENTAL STATES
8.5 LEVEL-BANDS
8.6 LEVELS
8.7 FRINGES
8.8 SOCIETIES OF MEMORIES
8.9 KNOWLEDGE-TREES
8.10 LEVELS AND CLASSIFICATIONS
8.11 LAYERS OF SOCIETIES
9 SUMMARIES
9.1 WANTING AND LIKING
9.2 GERRYMANDERING
9.3 LEARNING FROM FAILURE
9.4 ENJOYING DISCOMFORT
10 PAPERT'S PRINCIPLE
10.1 PIAGET'S EXPERIMENTS
10.2 REASONING ABOUT AMOUNTS
10.3 PRIORITIES
10.4 PAPERT'S PRINCIPLE
10.5 THE SOCIETY-OF-MORE
10.6 ABOUT PIAGET'S EXPERIMENTS
10.7 THE CONCEPT OF CONCEPT
10.8 EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT
10.9 LEARNING A HIERARCHY
11 THE SHAPE OF SPACE
11.1 SEEING RED
11.2 THE SHAPE OF SPACE
11.3 NEARNESSES
11.4 INNATE GEOGRAPHY
11.5 SENSING SIMILARITIES
11.6 THE CENTERED SELF
11.7 PREDESTINED LEARNING
11.8 HALF-BRAINS
11.9 DUMBBELL THEORIES
12 LEARNING MEANING
12.1 A BLOCK-ARCH SCENARIO
12.2 LEARNING MEANING
12.3 UNIFRAMES
12.4 STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION
12.5 THE FUNCTIONS OF STRUCTURES
12.6 ACCUMULATION
12.7 ACCUMULATION STRATEGIES
12.8 PROBLEMS OF DISUNITY
12.9 THE EXCEPTION PRINCIPLE
12.10 HOW TOWERS WORK
12.11 HOW CAUSES WORK
12.12 MEANING AND DEFINITION
12.13 BRIDGE-DEFINITIONS
13 SEEING AND BELIEVING
13.1 REFORMULATION
13.2 BOUNDARIES
13.3 SEEING AND BELIEVING
13.4 CHILDREN'S DRAWING-FRAMES
13.5 LEARNING A SCRIPT
13.6 THE FRONTIER EFFECT
13.7 DUPLICATIONS
14 REFORMULATION
14.1 USING REFORMULATIONS
14.2 THE BODY-SUPPORT CONCEPT
14.3 MEANS AND ENDS
14.4 SEEING SQUARES
14.5 BRAINSTORMING
14.6 THE INVESTMENT PRINCIPLE
14.7 PARTS AND HOLES
14.8 THE POWER OF NEGATIVE THINKING
14.9 THE INTERACTION-SQUARE
15 CONSCIOUSNESS AND MEMORY
15.1 MOMENTARY MENTAL STATE
15.2 SELF-EXAMINATION
15.3 MEMORY
15.4 MEMORIES OF MEMORIES
15.5 THE IMMANENCE ILLUSION
15.6 MANY KINDS OF MEMORY
15.7 MEMORY REARRANGEMENTS
15.8 ANATOMY OF MEMORY
15.9 INTERRUPTION AND RECOVERY
15.10 LOSING TRACK
15.11 THE RECURSION PRINCIPLE
16 EMOTION
16.1 EMOTION
16.2 MENTAL GROWTH
16.3 MENTAL PROTO-SPECIALISTS
16.4 CROSS-EXCLUSION
16.5 AVALANCHE EFFECTS
16.6 MOTIVATION
16.7 EXPLOITATION
16.8 STIMULUS VS. SIMULUS
16.9 INFANT EMOTIONS
16.10 ADULT EMOTIONS
17 DEVELOPMENT
17.1 SEQUENCES OF TEACHING-SELVES
17.2 ATTACHMENT-LEARNING
17.3 ATTACHMENT SIMPLIFIES
17.4 FUNCTIONAL AUTONOMY
17.5 DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES
17.6 PREREQUISITES FOR GROWTH
17.7 GENETIC TIMETABLES
17.8 ATTACHMENT-IMAGES
17.9 DIFFERENT SPANS OF MEMORIES
17.10 INTELLECTUAL TRAUMA
17.11 INTELLECTUAL IDEALS
f0 18 REASONING
18.1 MUST MACHINES BE LOGICAL?
18.2 CHAINS OF REASONING
18.3 CHAINING
18.4 LOGICAL CHAINS
18.5 STRONG ARGUMENTS
18.6 MAGNITUDE FROM MULTITUDE
18.7 WHAT IS A NUMBER?
18.8 MATHEMATICS MADE HARD
18.9 ROBUSTNESS AND RECOVERY
19 WORDS AND IDEAS
19.1 THE ROOTS OF INTENTION
19.2 THE LANGUAGE-AGENCY
19.3 WORDS AND IDEAS
19.4 OBJECTS AND PROPERTIES
19.5 POLYNEMES
19.6 RECOGNIZERS
19.7 WEIGHING EVIDENCE
19.8 GENERALIZING
19.9 RECOGNIZING THOUGHTS
19.10 CLOSING THE RING
20 CONTEXT AND AMBIGUITY
20.1 AMBIGUITY
20.2 NEGOTIATING AMBIGUITY
20.3 VISUAL AMBIGUITY
20.4 LOCKING-IN AND WEEDING-OUT
20.5 MICRONEMES
20.6 THE NEMEIC SPIRAL
20.7 CONNECTIONS
20.8 CONNECTION LINES
20.9 DISTRIBUTED MEMORY
21 TRANS-FRAMES
21.1 THE PRONOUNS OF THE MIND
21.2 PRONOMES
21.3 TRANS-FRAMES
21.4 COMMUNICATION AMONG AGENTS
21.5 AUTOMATISM
21.6 TRANS-FRAME PRONOMES
21.7 GENERALIZING WITH PRONOMES
21.8 ATTENTION
22 EXPRESSION
22.1 PRONOMES AND POLYNEMES
22.2 ISONOMES
22.3 DE-SPECIALIZING
22.4 LEARNING AND TEACHING
22.5 INFERENCE
22.6 EXPRESSION
22.7 CAUSES AND CLAUSES
22.8 INTERRUPTIONS
22.9 PRONOUNS AND REFERENCES
22.10 VERBAL EXPRESSION
22.11 CREATIVE EXPRESSION
23 COMPARISONS
23.1 A WORLD OF DIFFERENCES
23.2 DIFFERENCES AND DUPLICATES
23.3 TIME BLINKING
23.4 THE MEANINGS OF MORE
23.5 FOREIGN ACCENTS
24 FRAMES
24.1 THE SPEED OF THOUGHT
24.2 FRAMES OF MIND
24.3 HOW TRANS-FRAMES WORK
24.4 DEFAULT ASSUMPTIONS
24.5 NONVERBAL REASONING
24.6 DIRECTION-NEMES
24.7 PICTURE-FRAMES
24.8 HOW PICTURE-FRAMES WORK
24.9 RECOGNIZERS AND MEMORIZERS
25 FRAME-ARRAYS
25.1 ONE FRAME AT A TIME?
25.2 FRAME-ARRAYS
25.3 THE STATIONARY WORLD
25.4 THE SENSE OF CONTINUITY
25.5 EXPECTATIONS
25.6 THE FRAME IDEA
26 LANGUAGE-FRAMES
26.1 UNDERSTANDING WORDS
26.2 UNDERSTANDING STORIES
26.3 SENTENCE-FRAMES
26.4 A PARTY-FRAME
26.5 STORY-FRAMES
26.6 SENTENCE AND NONSENSE
26.7 FRAMES FOR NOUNS
26.8 FRAMES FOR VERBS
26.9 LANGUAGE AND VISION
26.10 LEARNING LANGUAGE
26.11 GRAMMAR
26.12 COHERENT DISCOURSE
27 CENSORS AND JOKES
27.1 DEMONS
27.2 SUPPRESSORS
27.3 CENSORS
27.4 EXCEPTIONS TO LOGIC
27.5 JOKES
27.6 HUMOR AND CENSORSHIP
27.7 LAUGHTER
27.8 GOOD HUMOR
28 THE MIND AND THE WORLD
28.1 THE MYTH OF MENTAL ENERGY
28.2 MAGNITUDE AND MARKETPLACE
28.3 QUANTITY AND QUALITY
28.4 MIND OVER MATTER
28.5 THE MIND AND THE WORLD
28.6 MINDS AND MACHINES
28.7 INDIVIDUAL IDENTITIES
28.8 OVERLAPPING MINDS
29 THE REALMS OF THOUGHT
29.1 THE REALMS OF THOUGHT
29.2 SEVERAL THOUGHTS AT ONCE
29.3 PARANOMES
29.4 CROSS-REALM CORRESPONDENCES
29.5 THE PROBLEM OF UNITY
29.6 AUTISTIC CHILDREN
29.7 LIKENESSES AND ANALOGIES
29.8 METAPHORS
30 MENTAL MODELS
30.1 KNOWING
30.2 KNOWING AND BELIEVING
30.3 MENTAL MODELS
30.4 WORLD MODELS
30.5 KNOWING OURSELVES
30.6 FREEDOM OF WILL
30.7 THE MYTH OF THE THIRD ALTERNATIVE
30.8 INTELLIGENCE AND RESOURCEFULNESS
APPENDIX
31.1 HEREDITY AND ENVIRONMENT
31.2 THE GENESIS OF MENTAL REALMS
31.3 GESTURES AND TRAJECTORIES
31.4 BRAIN CONNECTIONS
31.5 SURVIVAL INSTINCT
31.6 EVOLUTION AND INTENT
31.7 INSULATION AND INTERACTION
31.8 EVOLUTION OF HUMAN THOUGHT
POSTSCRIPT AND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
GLOSSARY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX