Psychology Dictionary of Arguments

Home Screenshot Tabelle Begriffe

 
Thought, philosophy: a thought corresponds to a complete sentence. There is debate about whether we can attribute such thoughts to animals. See also mentalism, mental states, opacity, thinking, reality, world/thinking, propositional attitudes, propositions, intensions, objects of thought, relation theory, mentalese, computation.
_____________
Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments.

 
Author Concept Summary/Quotes Sources

Marvin Minsky on Thoughts - Dictionary of Arguments

I 207
Ambiguity/thinking/Artificial Intelligence/Minsky: Thoughts themselves are ambiguous! If we interpret it to mean the states of all your agencies, that would include much that cannot be expressed simply because it is not accessible to your language-agency. A more modest interpretation of what you're thinking now would be a partial indication of the present states of some of your higher-level agencies. But the significance of any agency's state depends on how it is likely to affect the states of other agencies. This implies that in order to express your present state of mind, you have to partially anticipate what some of your agencies are about to do.
(…) the significance of a thought, idea, or partial state of mind depends upon which other thoughts are active at the time and upon what eventually emerges from the conflicts and negotiations among one's agencies.
The listener, too, must deal with ambiguity. If all our separate words are ambiguous by themselves, why are sentences so clearly understood? Because the context of each separate word is sharpened by the other words, as well as by the context of the listener's recent past.
I 210
At every moment a person's mind is already involved with some context in which many [software-] agents are actively aroused. Because of this, as each new word arouses different polynemes (>Terminology/Minsky
), these will compete to change the states of those agents. In a few cycles, the entire system will firmly lock in on one meaning-sense for each word and firmly suppress the rest. A computer program that actually worked this way was developed by Jordan Pollack and David Waltz. (…) after a few cycles, the agents ended up in a pattern of mutually supporting activities in which only one sense of each word remained strongly active while all the other meaning- senses were suppressed. In effect, the system had found a stable, unambiguous interpretation of the sentence.
((s) Cf. >Diagram for Pollack and Waltz (4/29/2020)).
Problem: What can be done if such a system settles on a wrong interpretation? Since a single new context clue might not be able to overcome an established alliance of meaning-senses, it might be necessary for some higher-level agency to start the system out afresh.
One way (…) would be to record which meaning-senses were adopted in the previous cycle and suppress them temporarily at the start of the next cycle. There is no guarantee that this method will always find an interpretation that yields a meaning consistent with all the words of the sentence.
>Language/Minsky, >Software-Agents/Minsky, >Society of Minds/Minsky.

_____________
Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments
The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition.

Minsky I
Marvin Minsky
The Society of Mind New York 1985

Minsky II
Marvin Minsky
Semantic Information Processing Cambridge, MA 2003


Send Link

Authors A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   Z  


Concepts A   B   C   D   E   F   G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U   V   W   Y   Z