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> If you want to get on the right track for how the brain actually works pickup Minsky's Society of Mind. I was with you until that last sentence. What you cal
by cosmojg 3y ago
> If you want to get on the right track for how the brain actually works pickup Minsky's Society of Mind.
I was with you until that last sentence. What you call the "Mental Health Industrial Complex" is the modern-day equivalent of the Catholic Church prior to the Enlightenment. The cure to the ills of Catholicism wasn't reading the Quran (Minsky's Society of Mind) instead of the Bible (the DSM). It was, as you said, turning away from dogma and towards science, rationality, and empiricism.
Like the DSM, Minsky's work presents many useful models for thinking about the mind, and I might even agree that they are more useful. However, what we really need to do is not just change our models, but acknowledge that modern clinical psychology is built more on tradition and authority than it is on the testing of such models.
- breck 3y agoI'd agree with you. My sentence was bad in that it oversells that book. That book is merely one baby step in the right direction. As excited as I am about Minsky's hypothesis that the brain is a society of agents, your point is the more important one that the process is more important. I also think Minsky would have agreed with you. His process seemed to be the Feynman "What I cannot create, I do not understand" approach. His thoughts on the brain were developed from building robots and multi-agent simulations and AI. Whereas the DSM says "here are the conditions, take this pill, pay us", he would say "we have no idea, let's keep building until we understand".