The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind

by Marvin Minsky

If a program works in only one way, then it gets stuck when that method fails. But a program that has several ways to proceed could then switch to some other approach, or search for a suitable substitute.

Love can make us disregard most defects and deficiencies, and make us deal with blemishes as though they were embellishments—even

To “see” an object or “speak” a word involves hundreds of different parts of your brain, each of which does some quite difficult jobs.

Whenever you think about your “Self,” you are switching among a huge network of models, each of which tries to represent some particular aspects of your mind—to answer some questions about yourself.

behavior of a complex machine depends only on how its parts interact, but not on the “stuff” of which they are made (except for matters of speed and strength).

Each of our major “emotional states” results from turning certain resources on while turning certain others off—thus changing the way one’s brain behaves.