The emotion machine

What Hacker News says

1. marvielMay 2025
   There are two good books that explore this concept from different angles:

   "The Emotion Machine", by Marvin Minksy (the AI view)

   &

   "The Art of Empathy", by Karla McLaren (the Internal / Emotional View)

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2. jcynixJul 2024
   Dennett has walked that path before. In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. [...]

   Quoted from rom https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...

   Regarding the multiple layers: the most interesting thoughts I read about theories of a mind, are the books by Marvin Minsky, namely: The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine which should be more widely known.

   More on Minsky's ideas on “Matter, Mind, and Models” are mentioned in https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i

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3. jcynixJul 2024
   Regarding Minsky: the most interesting thoughts I read about theories of a mind, are his books, namely: The Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine which should be more widely known.

   More of Minsky's ideas on “Matter, Mind, and Models” are mentioned here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1981/12/14/a-i

   And let's not forget Daniel Dennett: In “Consciousness Explained,” a 1991 best-seller, he described consciousness as something like the product of multiple, layered computer programs running on the hardware of the brain. [...]

   Quoted from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/27/daniel-dennett...

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4. max_Jan 2024
   The best books I would recommend are;

   — The Master Algorithm by Pedro Domingos

   — The Book of Why by Judea Pearl

   — What Computers Still Can't Do by Hubert L. Dreyfus

   — Society of Mind & The Emotion Machine by Marvin Minsky

   — The Feeling Of What Happens by Antonio Damasio

   — Language & Mind by Noam Chomsky

   — A great mooc is also, the "Learning From Data" Telecourse from Caltech https://work.caltech.edu/telecourse

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5. neilvDec 2022
   Also look at his later book, "The Emotion Machine".

   When I took Minsky's "Society of Mind" class, he was working on the later book, and many lectures were him talking about what he had been working on earlier that day.

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6. EliasYMar 2022
   Minsky's subsequent book called "the emotion machine" probably has some of the most complete treatments of topics like intelligence, understanding and consciousness.
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