Mind: Consortium of agents

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 consortium of agents, 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 tea cup 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 in to 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 articles of this series,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.

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 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 modification 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.T he 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 von 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,v ital force to animate each living thing.

Similarly,a century ago, we had essentially no way to start to explain how thinking works. Then psychologist like Sigmund Freud and Jean Piaget produced their theories about child development. Somewhat later, on the mechanical side,mathematicians like Kurt Godel 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 1940's, when Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitt 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 1950's, 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 series of articles will show how the tiny machines that we'll call "agents of the mind" could be the long sought" particles"that those theories need.