Minsky on Words

Marvin Minsky of MIT is a cognitive scientist and an artificial intelligence pioneer. I recently came acros his 1981 paper on “Music, Mind, and Meaning” which I found informative and profoundly thought provoking. Here’s an extended quote from it, for the record.

We cannot reward an act. We can only reward the agency that selected that strategy, the agent who wisely activated the first agent, and so on. Alas for those behaviorists who wasted their lives by missing this simple principle.

To reward all those agents and processes, we must propagate some message that they all can use to credit what they did; the plans they made, their strategies and computations. These various recipients have so little in common that such a message of approval, to work at all, must be extremely simple. Words like good are almost content-free messages that enable tutors, inside or outside a society, to tell the members that one or more of them has satisfied some need, and that tutor need not understand which members did what, or how, or even why.

Words like ‘satisfy’ and ‘need’ have many shifting meanings. Why, then, do we seem to understand them? Because they evoke that same illusion of substantiality that fools us into thinking it tautologous to ask, why do we like pleasure? This serves a need: the levels of social discourse at which we use such clumsy words as ‘like’, or ‘good’, or ‘that was fun’ must coarsely crush together many different meanings or we will never understand others (or ourselves) at all. Hence that precious, essential poverty of word and sign that makes them so hard to define. Thus the word ‘good’ is no symbol that simply means or designates, as ‘table’ does. Instead, it only names this protean injunction: Activate all those unknown processes that correlate and sift and sort, in learning, to see what changes (in myself) should now be made. The word like is just like good, except it is a name we use when we send such structure-building signals to ourselves. [Emphasis added.]

The line that I like best and deeply appreciate in the quote above is “that precious, essential poverty of word and sign that makes them so hard to define.” It is the ambiguity of some words that lends them power. I also think that all ambiguous things — ideas, people, stories, objects — are more interesting and signal greater depth than things that are easily defined and categorized.