The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind ^[1] is a book by cognitive scientist Marvin Lee Minsky. The book is a sequel to Minsky's earlier book Society of Mind.

Minsky argues that emotions are different ways to think that our mind uses to increase our intelligence. He challenges the distinction between emotions and other kinds of thinking. His main argument is that emotions are "ways to think" for different "problem types" that exist in the world. The brain has rule-based mechanism (selectors) that turns on emotions to deal with various problems. The book reviews the accomplishments of AI, what and why it is complicated to accomplish in terms of modeling how human beings behave, how they think, how they experience struggles and pleasures.^[2]

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Reviews[edit]

In a book review for the Washington Post, neurologist Richard Restak states that:^[3]

Minsky does a marvelous job parsing other complicated mental activities into simpler elements. ... But he is less effective in relating these emotional functions to what's going on in the brain.

Outline[edit]

Minsky outlines the book as follows:^{[citation needed]}

"We are born with many mental resources."
"We learn from interacting with others."
"Emotions are different Ways to Think."
"We learn to think about our recent thoughts."
"We learn to think on multiple levels."
"We accumulate huge stores of commonsense knowledge."
"We switch among different Ways to Think."
"We find multiple ways to represent things."
"We build multiple models of ourselves."

Other reviews[edit]

Author's Prepublication Draft[edit]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

Jump up^ Minsky, Marvin (2006). The Emotion Machine. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-7432-7663-9.
Jump up^ "The Emotion Machine". Book review & textbook buyback site BlueRectangle.com. Retrieved 2010-06-30.
Jump up^ Mind Over Matter, Richard Restak, Washington Post