"I don't see neuroscience as serious. What they have are nutty little theories, and they do elaborate experiements to confirm them and don't know what to do if they don't work. This book [The Emotion Machine] presents a very elaborate theory of consciousness. Consciousness is a word that confuses possibly 16 different processes. Most neurologists think everything is either conscious or not. But even Freud had several grades of consciousness. When you talk to neuroscientists, they seem so unsophisticated; they major in biology and know about potassium and calcium channels, but they don't have sophisticated psychological ideas. Neuroscientists should be asking: What phenomenon should I try to explain? Can I make a theory of it? Then, can I design an experiment to see if one of those theories is better than the others? If you don't have two theories, then you can't do an experiment. And they usually don't even have one."
~ Marvin Minsky Author of "Society of Mind" and the "Emotion Machine". MIT Professor and AI pioneer.
Quoted from Discover Magazine - January 2007
No comments:
Post a Comment