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Assignment 1

by Seum-Lim GAN (gan@media.mit.edu)

1.1 The agents of the mind
Everything is NOT mindless. If all things are mindless, how can they do what they are supposed to do ?

1.2 The mind and the brain
That is because we (humans) still have not understood how "life" works.

1.3 The society of mind
There is this "other side of the mind" or "subconcious mind" which handles routine exercises/movements which do not require own full attention. If we become, by accident, crippled/disabled, we will need more to move around because it will be something different and our "subconcious mind" may not know how to deal with.

1.4 The world of blocks
Why use block ? How about using a few agents to "keep a tank full".

1.5 Common sense
"Common sense" is not well defined. Something that makes sense to one may be nonsense to someone else. This is because everyone has different experiences/backgrounds/education.

1.6 Agents and agencies
Using the argument here, I'll say every agent is dumb and there is no such thing as intelligence. When every agent is combined, they form a machine that does something and that is it. No intelligence.

2.1 Components and connections
I'll say there should be interconnections among agents instead of just through the "top" agent".

2.2 Novelists and reductionists
Many sciences are based on approximations and assumptions that may be wrong by themselves. This is to make the lives of scientists easy or else they will not be able to come up with explanations. Afterall, the most fundamental matter is still not fully understood and will probably not be found at all.

2.3 Parts and wholes
Wholes and sums of parts are never equal as we always ignore things as we go along to make things easier. Life and mind are made out of countless number things. They all work together to form an entity that is useful.

2.5 Easy things are hard
That is because we do too many approoximations and assumptions.

2.6 Are people machines ?
People are intelligent life forms that can solve problem by learning and have emotions. Machines do not have emotions, so people are not machines. Until we learn how emotions work, we cannot build a perfect "human machine".

3.1 Conflict
There is a thing called "urge" which makes us want to do one thing rather than the other. If our eat agent grew too strong, we can still learn to supress it. That is how "fasting" work.

3.2 Noncompromise
There are many noncompromise within us and many are never resolved and left alone AND forgotten/lost. The same resource that may be shared by two agents may be used alternately to solve problem.

3.3 Hierarchies
Hierarchies never work very well in reallife and I cannot imagine it is used within the mind. If it is, we will not be doing anything at all but stall.

3.4 Heterarchies
Temporary memory ? Like stacks in computers ? Well, I may imagine that things gets pushed out of the stack when it is full and lost forever. But we still remember we need something to be done even after a long time. 3.5 Destructiveness
The word "urge" is used here. If it is used the represent the strength of an agent, then we have many urges that are not fulfilled. Destroying something does not solve the conflict among other agents as it is only temporary.

3.6 Pain and pleasure simplified
Pain and pleasure can be suppressed by problems.

4.1 The self
The self could be the whole object or entity and nothing else. Or, it could be parts or groups of the entity and not the whole entity. That's why it is not definite.

4.2 One self or many
Both are right and wrong. When all "child", "parent" and "adult" agree, we have one self. If not, we have multiple selves.

4.3 The soul
We never knew what a soul really is and neither can be say that it does not exist.

4.4 The conservative self
If there are really many selves within us, we can treat each of them as an agent and have a top agent manage them all. If this is the case, then the conservative self is also an agent and it itself must be managed by something else. So, there is no conservative self.

4.5 Exploitation
If every agent tries to exploit other agents, we will be dead. This is because our body cannot take it anymore and break down.

4.6 Self-control
There is no self-control. If there is, we will all be very civilised and there is no need for lawyers and courts.

4.7 Long-range plans
We never complete anything we started so long-range plans always become short-range plans and even then, never got completed.

4.8 Ideals
There is not such thing is ideals. Nothing works the way we want anyway. We only use ideals as "guidelines" to make things work better than worse.

5.1 Circular causality
There is always lopps among causes and effects. Anything we try to straighten, will eventually caught in a loop again.

5.2 Unaswerable questions
The idea of "cause and effect" is wrong if we need answers to the last question. However, there is no last question as we can never reach it when there is cause and effect around.

5.3 The remote-control self
The remote-control self is a loop itself embeded among the mess that "cause and effect" made.

5.4 Personal Identity
Personal identity is a "basis" or "fundamental model" of that person and many people can have the same model. Hence, there is no personal identity.

5.5 Fashion and style
Fasion/style, art or whatever we call these things, are merely creations of humans to kill time and do something useless so that other can keep them alive.

5.6 Traits
It is easier to copy than to create.

5.7 Permanent Identity
There is no such things as permanent identity. People change all the time and so does the universe.

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Assignment 1 (Old submission)

Use "keep tank full" as base study of agents instead of building a robot arm to build blocks :

  • Agents : keep tank full, measure tank, switch on tap, switch off tap.
  • This scoiety of minds is simple and can be built easily.
  • We can see that all it does is to keep the tank full.

    Every function we do is handled by agents, and every agent has a superior. Is there a supervisor right up at the top ? Perhaps some supervisor that says "Stay Alive !".

    "Stay Alive !" supervisor has to get many agents to make sure we stay alive.

    Even, higher than "Stay Alive !", there is another supervisor that holds the question "Why stay alive ?" and it has many agents to answer this question. It then uses this answer to instruct either "Stay Alive !" or "Die !" agents. These two agents are constantly fighting with each other whether we should stay alive or die !

    Then, on top of "Why stay alive ?", we have "Do we need to stay alive ?" and etc..

    Looks like this whole society of minds in us is dependant on one another and there is no "top" agent. When we consider a "top" agent, it itself needs instructions from other agents, that are somehow, through the long chains of commands given by other agents, is perhaps initiated by this agent itself, like a LOOP.

    Another point of interest about "Do we need to stay alive ?".
    When this is asked countless number of times, up to the point when a person is about to die, there suddenly are answers "No" to this question from many agents because they cannot get things done from agents that have failed or about to fail. Then "Do we need to stay alive ?" will get "Die !" agent to work and stop everything.

    This stopping process may be a proper shutdown of bodily functions or just an abrupt shutdown of everything suddently.

    Who knows ? Maybe the "Die !" agent is not able to perform its task well enough because its agents are at fault or have failed and become weakened. The "Stay Alive !" agent may just take over and we are still alive ! Amazing ! Look whatÕs happening within us !

    One thought : Does death reminds us of life ? or vice versa.

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