The Emotion Machine: Consciousness

The word consciousness troubles Minsky in Chapter 4, The Emotion Machine, as do other words that are often used to describe what's going on inside our brains. Minsky calls them “suitcase words”. That is, words that have been around for centuries and carry too much meaning, like intelligence or cognition. These words point to multiple levels of mental activities, but too often over-simplify rather than explain. Suitcase words need to be unpacked. Chapter 4 argues that suitcase words may also preserve outdated concepts. Long ago, it was thought that a “vital force” explained life in living organisms. A vital force simply infused with the body of an organism to give it life. This belief was widely held before biology explained life as a massive collection of different processes that go on inside cells and membranes replete with intricate biological machinery. Consciousness, Minsky argues, doesn’t explain what happens inside the brain any more than the vital force explains what happens inside living organisms. It’s simply an outdated concept.

Also, an insight about brain evolution in this chapter suggests that the structures in our brains are massively redundant as “large parts of our brains work mainly to correct mistakes that other parts make” because “while some structures worked well in earlier times, they now behave in dangerous ways, so we had to evolve corrections for them.” This is one reason Minsky thinks human psychology is so difficult, because for every rule of thought that psychologists define, there are long lists of exceptions, given our evolutionary brain baggage. As soon as I find a good example of a dangerous behavior that evolution has corrected, I'll capture it.