The Emotion Machine
Sunday 5 September 2004 18:55-19:15 (Radio 3)
What are emotions? Why do we have them? Why does music spark them off?
Marvin Minsky, the 'father of artificial intelligence' (and a big fan of Beethoven) talks to Chris Maslanka about his compelling new theory of human emotions.
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Marvin Minsky - often called the "father of AI" - is one of the world's leading thinkers in cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence. Naturally, the two are closely linked: thinking about the human brain is one very good way of getting ideas for building an artificial brain!
Minsky's now in his late 70s and can look back on a lifetime of theoretical and practical advances in his fields. He built the world's first neural network ["SNARC"] in 1951, and as early as 1959 he co-founded MIT's AI Laboratory, which has set the agenda for what was then a fledgling discipline ever since. No-one working in Artificial Intelligence can ignore Minsky's ideas or his practical work: he designed and built some of the first mechanical hands with tactile sensors, visual scanners, and their software and computer interfaces.
Minsky's most famous advance in cognitive psychology is the theory known as The Society of Mind, developed with Seymour Papert. The idea: that intelligence isn't the product of any singular mechanism in the brain, but comes from the interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents and different "representations" of a single phenomenon in the mind. Obviously it's only a theory - and it's aroused plenty of opposition as well as support. But it has very appealing features. Not only does it explain a lot of conundrums about the human mind, it also seems biologically plausible - evolution suggests that our brains (like everything else) would develop diversity. Minsky's best-known book [1985] is called The Society of Mind: its 270 interconnected one-page ideas reflect the structure of the theory itself.
Recently Minsky has been developing his ideas about the human brain in a new direction. He's at work on a book called The emotion machine, attempting one of the holy grails of psychology: an explanation of human emotions, how they work and why we have them.
Minsky is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Visit his MIT web page at http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ to read lots of his published papers - including explorations of music and jokes! Plus you can read the latest draft of his book The Emotion Machine - and send him your comments.
