6.868/MAS.731J: Society of Mind 2012

6.868/MAS.731J: Society of Mind

Professor: Marvin Minsky
Teaching Assistants:Dustin Smith (dustin@media.mit) and David Dalrymple and Kasia Hayden
Administrative Assistant: Betty Lou McClanahan (bl@media.mit)
Lectures: TBA
Location: 32-141 on first floor of Stata.

Tonight, February 8th, Professor Minsky will be in 32-141 at 7pm to discuss the plans for the Spring 2012 semester.

6.868 will not be offered in the spring of 2012. Instead, Professor Minsky and TAs will organize an informal seminar series over the semester. If you would like to participate, please email

Course Information

The subject of this course is to discuss theories about how minds work. We will emphasize aspects of thinking that are so poorly understood that they are still considered to be more philosophical than scientific. Readings and discussions will focus on Marvin Minsky's "Emotion Machine", parts of "Society of Mind", and how these relate to key works from many disciplines: artificial intelligence, integrative neuroscience, cognitive science, and linguistics.

You will learn about theories of intelligence with an emphasis on designing and building general problem solvers that do not get stuck on any particular problem. We will focus on questions like:

How do children learn about morality and social goals?

How does one learn a new way to think to handle a new type of situation?

How do minds switch between different representations and methods of reasoning?

Why do we like music, jokes and pleasure?

What is Pain and why does it Hurt?

What are Ideas?

What is Consciousness?

What use are Emotions?

How does an agent represent and reason about itself?

What controls the subjects you think about?

Our goal is to replace ill-defined folk theories of 'consciousness', 'self' and 'emotion' with more concrete computational concepts. Enrollment is limited and an application is necessary. Paperback copies of Professor Minsky's books are available at the Coop.

Schedule & Assignments

Course news, readings and homework assignments now on Stellar, so that we could more easily add additional course materials.

Grading

There is no final exam in this class. Your homework will consist of three laboratory assignments (including programming exercises), a brief proposal for a final project (not graded) and a final project.

10% Reading Responses and Discussion Participation
45% Laboratory Assignments (3)
45% Final Project (5% is proposal)

Caveat Emptor

This course is for students who have already read The Society of Mind. Without that background, it will be hard to learn from the lectures. This subject is still highly speculative, and many students find that it lacks the precision found in more mature areas. Furthermore, people have different learning styles, and you may find my teaching style to be too experimental and improvisatory for you. Do not hesitate to drop the subject early if you find such an incompatibility. In any case, to help make the class seminar interactive, you should always come prepared with some issue to discuss.

Miscellaneous

Push Singh's PhD Thesis, EM-ONE: An Architecture for Reflective Commonsense Thinking [pdf] [html]

Bob Hearn's homepage. Read his Master's thesis for ideas concerning the SoM application.

Commonsense Computing at the MIT Media Lab.

Commonsense Bibliography is a reading list of several works related to commonsense reasoning and knowledge prepresentation.