From Stewart Brand's The MIT Media Lab: Inventing the Future:
After a dinner of take-out dim sum, Minsky, who had been reading
the Koran with some dismay at its violent inquiry-blunting formulae,
sermonized, “Religion is a teaching machine— a little deadly loop for
putting itself in your mind and keeping it there. The main concern of
a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt. It’s interested in solving
deep problems, not in understanding them. And it’s correct in a sense,
because the problems it deals with don’t have solutions, because they’re
loops. ‘Who made the world?’ ‘God.’ You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who
made God?’”
“Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the
time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re
willing to look that far out of focus. I’d watch that. Then you’ll find that
black is white. Look for differences! You’re looking for similarities again.
That way lies mind rot.” That lively loop has been cycling in my mind
ever since!
> “Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus.
this breaks down when you remember that contemporary science emerged in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries out of the work of people like newton and kant who saw themselves as engaged in a (partially) theological pursuit.
> You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who made God?’
this is actually a pretty active inquiry in theological circles, and one of the sources of difference between Christian sects. although us Christians tend to frame it more from a creationist perspective as "what sort of entity is God and what bearing would that have on the way we see God's creation and custodianship of the world". much like with science, faith does not preclude curiosity for the reigious.
There are dogmatic forms of religion and non-dogmatic forms.
The mystics of various religious affiliation sought a direct experience of the transcendent reality, which as an experience itself is beyond dogma (though dogma could play a role in the experience's interpretation).
Oh I've seen a lot of loops and asked a lot of questions about them.
In one particular instance I had logically concluded myself into an extratemporal nihilism, where I forgot that time exists, therefore everything was meaningless. It ended when my friends reminded me that time indeed exists and everything will pass, including this momentary infinity.
Your mind is, literally at the biological level, a bunch of loops for electricity to flow through. It's not like your mind channels energy to get rid of it? It's more efficient to hold onto energy, and you need a loop for that to maintain continuous function.
Don't mistake the spiral for a loop. It only appears to go around in circles because you're a lesser-dimensional being looking at it from a flat plane. Stars don't have stable orbits, they follow a straight line through warped spacetime. We also travel forwards in time. Everywhere is a point of no return because no place is exactly the same when returned to. Time is change. Evolution is an inevitable phenomena of some law of physics we might as well call God.
Nature, like God, is mysterious. The more we learn, the less we know we know. Knowing anything, even a load of nothing, calms the mind. Asking questions is the surest way to engage a brain. Asking difficult questions is like discovering labyrinths. Yes, they're confusing to navigate. Yes, there be monsters. But also, loot and enlightenment.
It turns out there's a bit of truth in everything and a byte of lies to chew through to get to the good stuff. Nature protects its bounty. You have teeth for a reason. Brush them and smile. You're God.
love expands life
life expands consciousness
consciousness is vital to space travel
travel, without moving.
"If you remove the dogma - what do you have left of religion, exactly?"
If you'd ever had a mystical experience, you wouldn't need to ask that question.
Many have argued that mystical experiences were at the core of every major religion, and it was when people stopped having these experiences that dogma accreted.
That's a very limited view of religion. Think of religions as frameworks for interpreting the world. You don't need dogma to be an effective framework. Plus, not all religions are dogmatic, in fact most aren't. The Abrahamic faiths are the exceptions, not the rule.
The nervous system of every single animal in existence, unlike the existence of god.
>because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality
The problem is consensus and alternatives. If you reject the traditional answer of "1+1" and go for one of its many, many very convincing alternatives, would anybody go after you with a fork and threateningly insist you follow the $one_true_interpretation?
That's what (organized Abrahamic) religions are usually criticized for, "useful" is entirely irrelevant and dependent on the objective function used, the real test of an ideology is : what if somebody chooses a different objective function? because (organized Abrahamic) religions are often totalitarian, they cope very badly with some nodes refusing the general consensus.
I would discourage turning this conversation into a pissing contest of which ideology is responsible for more harm. (re: darwinism at the start of the 20th century)
I would much rather explore how the two can coexist. Does a material and immaterial explanation of reality make sense?
> Somethings are asserted (rather than argued) as axioms, because they give rise to useful interpretations of reality.
By who, and to what end?
Most people don't even know what an axiom is. Axioms are for playing logic games in math land - there is no reason why we should adopt a similar approach to everyday life.
Let me explain something about useful interpretations - we call those science. Science is when you go on to see what is, repeatedly, verifiably so.
I challenge you to find a more useful interpretation of reality, than one that we can replicate trillions of times, reliably, to achieve wonders no human thought possible a hundred years ago.
I'm not pushing an agenda, simply pointing out Minsky's hypocrisy. He thinks he's transcending the "loop" of ideology, but really just displacing one with another.
But thanks anyway for the patronizing explanation that absolutely no one asked for.
> The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt.
I've recently been thinking that the main reason why certain religions/ideologies are so popular, is in fact, because they release you from the burden of coming up with an answer to some very fundamental questions about life. There is this idea about the brain, that it tries to optimize energy-usage, and if you don't have to ask yourself these fundamental questions all the time, you can spend brainpower on other things. So people naturally follow a regime of dogmas proposed by some authority, to focus on other things in life.
Or as an evolutionary argument: Those who had the luxury of ignoring contemplating their own existence, had the privilege of spending their brainpower on things that helped their community and subsequently helped it spread.
About the topic at hand: I think this modular approach to the mind is misguided. By now I'm almost certain that the brain is compositional, instead. These phenomena described by Minsky surely are emergent, or at least most of them.
I've been coming around to this as well, which surprised me as I thought I had left religion for good.
> release you from the burden of coming up with an answer to some very fundamental questions about life.
I'd even modify this to say "impossible burden". Science reduces to the model: P(A|B). No model is ever safe, since we can never observe the generator of B, and changes in B can turn the whole model irrelevant. So the pursuit of some perfect scientific model of the world is an endeavor with 0% probability of success.
Hence, it seems the wiser strategy is to have a strategic balance between religion and science. What that split is, and whether it's most advantageous to do so at the society level or society of mind level, I don't know.
An even better deconstruction of religion was laid out in the Metamagical Themas column, in the January 1983 issue of Scientific American: "Virus-like sentences and self-replicating structures" (https://www.scientificamerican.com/magazine/sa/1983/01-01/).
The article was about memes. And it presented religion as a meme: a viral idea that propagates partly through terrorizing the host mind ("If you don't believe, if you don't spread this meme, you'll burn in HELL!" - although it was more nuanced than my one-sentence summary...)
While science is a method and not a dogma, a lot of dogma gets called science and treated with exactly the kind of religious fervour science is supposed to be able to cut through. The number of people who could not run an experiment or parse a research paper exhorting everyone to 'trust The Science' over the last two years truly irritated me, less so for the religious beliefs they were pushing than how enthusiastically they were diluting the meaning of science as a method.
>This course is an introduction to the theory that tries to explain how minds are made from collections of simpler processes.
Whereas, at least in parts, the brain seems to work 'reductively': [1]
>In fish...
>"Contrary to expectation, the synaptic strengths in the pallium remained about the same regardless of whether the fish learned anything. Instead, in the fish that learned, the synapses were pruned from some areas of the pallium — producing an effect “like cutting a bonsai tree,” Fraser said — and replanted in others."
Could it be that we need other forms of thinking than mere 'analytical thinking' to come up with a full understanding of the human mind?
There is the theory that the mind is a construction of culture. Essentially we use tools (such as maps or fingers to count) which are external to us, later become internalized. It´s an oversimplification but the point being is that you need other people for minds to develop, and this development happens through culture. [1]
The thing that we talk about here is the property of Emergence. [2]
"In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when an entity is observed to have properties its parts do not have on their own, properties or behaviors which emerge only when the parts interact in a wider whole. "
Read the first few chapters, and I'm hooked. If this were a course when I was in college I would have been all over it.
I suspect with the mind and also life, we will eventually come to the conclusion that they are just human constructs, and either everything is conscious/alive, or everything inanimate, depending on how you look at it. Similar to how Goedel found the boundary of math and Wittgenstein philosophy.
He gets a little into the weeds at the end of it, but you would probably enjoy the first couple chapters of Spinoza’s ethics. In the book he’s trying to create a solid quasimarhematical foundation for ethics based in his understanding of how the human mind relates to its outside world. His conclusion is that the world of the mind and the world of external reality run parallel to each other. He ‘solves’ Descartes’s mind-body problem by saying there is no problem, they are just two totally separate ways of talking about the same thing.
This is an incredible lecture series, and one to watch if you ever catch yourself taking MIT OCW for granted. (This is a figure of speech and not necessarily to be taken literally.)
I love Society of Mind. I read it concurrently with A Thousand Brains by Hawkins. It seems like modeling the mind as a multi-agent system is a productive approach.
I was also recommended Minsky's later Emotion Machine, which I'm reading now (thanks DK for the pointer!).
Minsky's subsequent book called "the emotion machine" probably has some of the most complete treatments of topics like intelligence, understanding and consciousness.
Remember: Minsky organized academic conferences at Jeffrey Epstein's private island. Virginia Giuffre testified in a 2015 deposition in her defamation lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein's associate Ghislaine Maxwell that Maxwell "directed" her to have sex with Minsky.
After a dinner of take-out dim sum, Minsky, who had been reading the Koran with some dismay at its violent inquiry-blunting formulae, sermonized, “Religion is a teaching machine— a little deadly loop for putting itself in your mind and keeping it there. The main concern of a religion is to stop thinking, to suppress doubt. It’s interested in solving deep problems, not in understanding them. And it’s correct in a sense, because the problems it deals with don’t have solutions, because they’re loops. ‘Who made the world?’ ‘God.’ You’re not allowed to ask, ‘Who made God?’”
“Science feels and acts like a kind of religion a lot of the time.” Minsky had heard that one before: “Everything is similar if you’re willing to look that far out of focus. I’d watch that. Then you’ll find that black is white. Look for differences! You’re looking for similarities again. That way lies mind rot.” That lively loop has been cycling in my mind ever since!