Minsky on Love

Marvin Minsky, in his new book called The Emotion Machine says that understanding emotions like love are essential if we are ever to create thinking machines:

When we talk about a person's mind, we usually use the plural, emotions, but we always use the singular noun to speak about someone's intellect. however, this book will take the view that each person has multiple Ways to think, and what we call "emotional" states are merely different examples of these. To be sure, we all grow up with the popular view that we have only a single Way to think -- called "logical" or "rational" -- but that our thinking can be colored, or otherwise influenced by so-called emotional factors.

However, the concept of Rational Thinking is incomplete -- because logic can only help us to draw conclusions from the assumptions that we happen to make -- but logic, alone, says nothing about which assumptions we ought to make.

Minsky goes on to say that in the usual view of how human minds grow, each child begins with instinctive reactions, but then goes through stages of mental growth that give us additional layers and levels of processes. Those older instincts may still remain, but these new resources gain increasing control -- until we can think about our own motives and goals and perhaps try to change or reformulate them. But then he wonders how could we learn which new goals to adopt? No infant could ever be wise enough to make good such choices by itself.

I've just begun reading the book and it is enjoyable, and expands upon the ideas proposed in his earlier classic, Society of Mind. I'll post more thoughts as I explore the work further.