Societies of Mind

Winograd has made a similar point about the wishful thinking in another branch of emergent AI that has come to be known as the "society theory" of mind.^[33] Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert have built a computational model that sees the mind as a society of interacting agents that are highly anthropomorphized, discussed in the terms one usually reserves for a whole person. But their agents do not have the complexity of people. Instead, the society theory is based (as is the idea of perceptrons) on these agents being "dumb." Each agent has a severely limited point of view. Like the voting agents in a perceptron model, this narrowness of vision leads them to different opinions. Intelligence emerges from their interactions and negotiations. In its construction of a highly anthropomorphized inner world, society theory uses a language about mind that is resonant with the object-relations tradition in psychoanalytic thinking.^[34]

In classical psychoanalytic theory, a few powerful inner structures (e.g, the superego) act on memories, thoughts, and wishes. Object relations theory posits a dynamic system in which the distinction between processed and processor breaks down.^[35] The parallel with computation is clear: in both cases, there is movement away from a situation in which a few inner structures act on more passive stuff. Psychoanalyst W. R. D. Fairbairn replaced the Freudian dichotomy of ego and id, structure and drive energy with independent agencies within the mind who think, wish, and generate meaning in interaction with one another.

The Minsky-Papert computational model evokes the world of Fairbairn. In the case of both psychoanalysis and society theory, a static model (on the one hand, based on drive and on the other, based on information) is replaced by an active one. A model that seems mechanistic and overly specified as something that could encompass the human psyche is replaced by a model with a certain mystery, a model of almost chaotic interactions. The most elaborated presentation of the society model is Minksy's The Society of Mind .^[36] There, instead of what Winograd describes as the "finely tuned clockwork" of information-processing AI, we get an "impressionistic pastiche of metaphors." In a microworld of toy blocks, Minsky describes how agents that at first blush seem like simple computational subroutines work together to perform well-defined tasks like building

towers and tearing them down. But then comes the wishful thinking, what Wingorad here calls the "sleight of hand."^[37] Minsky speculates how, within an actual child, the agents responsible for BUILDING and WRECKING might become versatile enough to offer support for one another's goals. In Minsky's imaginative text, they utter sentences like, "Please WRECKER, wait a moment more till BUILDER adds just one more block: it's worth it for a louder crash."^[38] winograd points out that Minsky has moved from describing the agents as subroutines to speaking of them as entities with consciousness and intention. And his reaction is sharp:

With a simple "might indeed become versatile," we have slipped from a technically feasible but limited notion of agents as subroutines, to an impressionistic description of a society of homunculi, conversing with one another in ordinary language. This sleight of hand is at the center of the theory. It takes an almost childish leap of faith to assume the modes of explanation that work for the details of block manipulation will be adequate for understanding conflict consciousness, genius, and freedom of will.

One cannot dismiss this as an isolated fantasy. Minsky is one of the major figures in artificial intelligence and he is only stating in a simplistic form a view that permeates the field.^[39]

Winograd attributes the sleight of hand o Minsky's faith that since we are no more than "protoplasm-based physical symbol systems, the reduction must be possible and only our current lack of knowledge prevents us from explicating it in detail, all way from BUILDER's clever play down to the logical circuitry." In other words, Winograd attributes the sleight of hand to Minsky's belief in the physical symbol system hypothesis. In interpret it somewhat differently. Minsky's leap of faith, his confidence in the power of the agents, is based on his belief—one that I see at the core of the romantic reaction in artificial intelligence—that the interaction of agents causes something to emerge beyond what is possible through the manipulation of symbols alone.

Winograd's critique reflects his model of what Minsky's audience wants to hear, of the culture Minsky is writing to. Winograd bleieves that they want to hear a vindication of physical symbols, that they want to hear that symbols and rules will ultimately tell the story. The way I see it, Minsky's audience, like theaudience for connctionism, wants to hear precisely the opposite. In the 1970s, the culture of AI enthusiasts was committed to a rule-based model, but now things have changed. Both professionals and the lay public are drawn to soceity theory and to connectionism not because they promise specificity but because they like

their lack of specificity. We. Daniel Hills, designer of the "Connection Machine," a massively parallel computer, puts the point well:

It would be very convenient if intelligence were an emergent behavior of randomly connected neurons in the same sense that snowflakes and whirlpools are emergent behaviors of water molecules. It might then be possible to build a thinkign machine by simply hooking together a sufficiently large network of artificial neurons. The notion of emergence would suggest that such a network, once it reached some critical mass, would spontaneously begin to think.

This is a seductive idea because it allows for the possibility of constructing intelligence without first understanding it . Understanding intelligence is difficult and probably a long way off, so the possibility that it might spontaneously emerge from the interactions of a large collection of simple parts has considerable appeal to the would-be builder of thinking machines.

. . . Ironically, the apparent inscriutibility of the idea of intelligence as an emergent behavior accounts for much of its continuing popularity.^[40]

The strength of object theories in both psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence is a conceptual framework that offers rich possibilities for models of interactive process; the weakness, which is of course what Wingorad is pointing to, is that the framework may be too rich. The postulated objects may be too powerful when they epxlain the mind by postulating many minds within it.^[41] Object theory confronts both fields with the problem of infinite regress, but Minsky is writing to a professional audience that has sensitized itself to its heady possibilities. Computer scientists are used to relying on recurison, a controlled form of circular reasoning; it would not be going too far to say that some have turned it into a transcendent value. For douglas Hofstadter, computation and the power of self-reference weave together art, music, and mathematics into an eternal golden braid that brings coherency and a shared aesthetic to the sciences and the arts. His vision is, to say the least, rmantic. In Gödel, Escher, Bach , he speaks of it as a kind of religion.^[42] Hofstadter's brilliant and accessible writing has done a great deal to legitimate the circularity implicit in accounting for the entities that are then to acocunt for thought in the wider culture.

In the 1970s, Minsky said, "The mind is a meant machine." the phrase became famous. During my research program in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I interviewed hundreds of people in both the technical and lay cultures about their beliefs about computers, about how smart the machines were then and how smart they might someday be. In these conversations, Minsky's words were often cited as an example of "what was wrong" with AI. They provoked irritaiton, even disgust. I believe they seemed unacceptable not so much because of their substance but because of then-prevalent images of what kind of machine the mind's meat ma-

chine might be. These images were mechanistic. But now, a source of connectionism's appeal is precisely that it proposes an artificial meat machine, a computational machine made of biological resonant components. And with a changed image of the machine, the idea that the mind is one becomes far less problematic.

Even those who were most critical of rule-driven AI are somewhat disarmed by emergent models that turn away from rules and toward biology. Dreyfus, for example, had criticized smybolic information-processing AI in terms of a broader critique of a purely syntactic, representational view of the relation of mind to reality. Pointing to the work of Martin Heidegger and the later Ludwig Wittgenstein, he made the point that "Both these thinkers had called into question the very tradition on which symbolic information processing was based. Both were holists, both were struck by the importance of everyday practices, and both held that one could not have a theory of the everyday world."^[43] Now, he sees neural networks in a position to prove them right and him as well:

If multilayered networks succeed in fulfilling their promise, researchers will have to give up the conviction of Descartes, Husserl, and early Wittgenstein that the only way to produce intelligent behavior is to mirror the world with a formal theory in mind. . . . Neural networks may show that Heidegger, later Wittgenstein and Rosenblatt [an early neural net theorist] were right in thinking that we behave intelligently in the world without having a theory of that world.^[44]

While cautionus, Dreyfus is receptive to the technical possibilities and philosophical importance of connectionist research in a way that he never was toward traditional AI. Similarly, cultural critics such as Leo Marx, long skeptical about the impact of technology on liberal and humanistic values, have found the "contextual, gestaltist, or holistic theory of knowledge implicit in the connectinist research program" to be "particularly conductive to acquiring complex cultural understanding, a vital form of liberal knowledge."^[45] Although the sympathetic response here is less to connectionism than to its metaphors, his warm feelings, like those of Dreyfus, show how connectionism has new possibilities for intellectual imperialism. Connectionism has received good press as a more "humanistic" form of AI endeavor, with the stress on its respect for the complexity and mystery of mind.