The Emotion Machine

163

Another answer might be that some information is stored ‘dynamically’—for example by being repeatedly echoed between two or more different clusters of brain cells.

164

I described a similar system for verbal communication in §22.10 of SoM.

165

The K-line idea was first developed in [Ref: Plain Talk] and [Ref: K-lines]. Chapter 8 of SoM describes more ideas about what might happen when K-lines conflict.

166

Perhaps she used that facial expression to help her maintain her concentration. If this became part of her subsequent skill, it could later be hard to eliminate.

167

In the field of Artificial Intelligence, the importance of credit-assignment was first recognized in Arthur Samuel’s research on machine learning. [Ref.]

168

A. Newell, “The chess machine,” in Proc. Western Joint Computer Conf. March 1955.

169

People often describe such moments as the times at which they make their decisions—and then regard these as ‘acts of free will.” However, one might instead regard those moments as merely the times at which one’s ‘deciding’ comes to a stop.

170

Presumably, these capacities also may vary among different parts of the same mind.

171

Some of this section is adapted from §7.10 of SoM.

172

Harold G. McCurdy, The Childhood Pattern of Genius. Horizon Magazine, May 1960, pp. 32-38. McCurdy concluded that mass education in public schools has “the effect of reducing all three of the above factors to minimum values.”

173

Where do we get those default assumptions? Answer: we usually make a new frame by making changes in some older one, and values that were not changed at that time will be inherited from those older ones.

174

I should add that a frame can include some additional slots that activate other processes or sets of resources. This way, a frame could transiently activate ways to think—so that one almost instantly knows how to deal with some familiar object or situation.

175

I should add that numerical representations have many useful applications. However, even when those numbers have some practical use, one can only alter them by increasing or decreasing them, but cannot add other nuances. It is much the same ‘logical’ systems; each ‘proposition’ must be true or false, so the system still uses something like numbers, except that their values can only be 0 or 1. Also, see see SOM, section 5.3.

176

§§20.1 of SoM argues that even our thoughts can be ambiguous.