§ 1-7 What Are Selves?

What does it mean when you say to yourself, "That was a stupid thing to do," or "I didn’t expect to succeed at that!" What does it mean when you praise yourself or blame yourself, or hold yourself responsible for something you feel that you should not have done? Do you have both a 'you' and a different 'yourself'–or is your mind filled with a crowd of them, pushing and shoving each other around? Whenever you change your emotional state, you're no longer quite the very same ‘you'–for you're using some different resources and memories.

Then what gives you that sense of remaining the same, while those changes are reshaping you? This must be, in part, because you keep using the same ways to describe yourself. In §Self we'll see how using terms like ‘me’ leads us to think about ourselves as like the eye of a cyclone that stays in place while other things circle around it. There are many ways in which it is useful to think that there is some thing called "I" that serves as a center of control for all the rest of a human mind. However, in §Self, I'll argue that there is no single central such thing. Instead you have many such processes for control, that get engaged at different times and in different ways, while switching between different to describe your constantly changing states of mind. In §Panalogy, I'll try to explain why we're rarely aware that we’re making such changes.

marvin minsky - the emotion machine, 1995-today (draft) Chapters 123456