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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from unus mundus
from the lowly matter axiom
  • Minsky of course made a career out of denying this axiom. Other AI people too of course, but he aimed straight at it. His Minsky/Matter, Mind, and Models paper has a theory for why the dualism arises in the first place.

Minsky/Matter, Mind, and Models

03 Jan 2023 - 28 Sep 2026
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    • A theory as to why dualism is so ingrained into the way we see the world.
    • I have always thought this to be one of Minsky's more brilliant insights. Unlike some of his deas which require a certain mechanist mindset, this one goes a couple of levels meta on that and explains why we have in our heads a distinction between mechanical and mental in the first place.
    • The rough argument is: cognition requires building models (that is, computational structures that represent reality and let you reason about it). The exact nature of these models doesn't matter (they probably aren't made out of predicate logic), but they exist because we can think about things that are not in front of our eyes:
    • To an observer B, an object A is a model of an object A to the extent that B can use A to answer questions that interest him about A. The model relation is inherently ternary.
    • Models are not cleanly divisible into static representations and dynamic computational processes:
    • However, one cannot ready expect to find, in an intelligent machine, a clear separation between coding and knowledge structures, either anatomically or functionally, because (for example) some "knowledge" is likely to be used in the encoding and interpreting processes
    • The paper then introduces, as a specific case of the above, the symbolism
      • M: man, W: world, W*: world model
    • The text contains a very unfortunate and confusing typo (the version below corrects it in boldface from the original publication in Semantic Information Processing):
    • If **W\*** contains a model M\* of M then M\ can contain a model W* of W\*; and, going one step further, W\*\* may contain a model M\*\* of M\*. Indeed, this must be the case if M is to answer general questions about himself. Ordinary questions about himself, e.g., how tall he is, are answered by M\, but very broad questions about his nature, e.g., what kind of a thing he is, etc., are answered, if at all, by descriptive statements made by M about M.
    • Random
      • Matter, Mind and Models - Marvin Minsky I like this take but I think Marvin might hate it (from "The Library of Consciousness)
        • In this paper, Minsky ponders the enigmatic relationship between the physical and metaphysical. He suggests our inner worlds are bisected—part mechanical, part magical. This split identity leads to tangled beliefs when we probe our own natures. Though science may someday bridge the body and soul, Minsky foresees our hearts ever holding fast to ghosts in the machine. For in the end, we are but Patchwork Men—stitches of logic and fantasy, reason and madness, particles and dreams.
          • nce may someday bridge the body and (Text sourced from [Matter, Mind and Models - Marvin Minsky](