A New Theory of Mental Functioning: The Society of Mind

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Ducret, Jean-Jacques

Affiliations: Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Education, Université de Geneve

Abstract: Times are such that one of the most profound renewals in the history of American psychology and of psychology in general now comes from a scientist who was trained as a mathematician and became one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence, namely Marvin Minsky. The Society of Mind - the book in which he states his theory, in part the outcome of his collaboration with Seymour Papert - sharply departs from the all too simplistic psychologies that usually characterize work in A.I.; perhaps we have to go back to Freud's Outline of a Scientific Psychology to find a comparably ambitious endeavour to describe mental functioning. In view of what seems to us to be its “paradigmatic” importance for psychology (in the Kuhnian sense), we shall try to clarify the part it may play in renewing psychology, and in turn to determine the possible contribution of genetic psychology to this new approach in A.I. Minsky's conception is more a research programme than a completed theory and it is set down in some two hundred arguments or propositions. Most are rather simple and obvious, some are more speculative in nature. We find ourselves at a crossroad where computer science, neuroscience and psychology converge in a series of arguments; each attempting to discover or describe one aspect or one process of the functioning of the mind. The project is quite clear: To set up a kind of artificial intelligence that would be fused into our knowledge of human intelligence. Consider a mechanical robot endowed, or paired with, a mechanical brain. What are the necessary components? How do they interact and co-operate so that the resulting global behaviour simulates human thought? Of course, such a project raises a number of philosophical and epistemological questions which the author doesn't evade. He gives clear cut and often original answers that, as we shall see, only need be cleared of a few elements inherited from a precybernetical mechanical materialism.

DOI: 10.3233/AIC-1988-1302

Journal: AI Communications, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 4-19, 1988