Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Thinking Machines 143What would it mean for an information-retrieval system to be optimallydesigned? It should cough up the information most likely to beuseful at the time of the request. But how could that be known inadvance? The probabilities could be estimated, using general laws aboutwhat kinds of information are most likely to be needed. If such lawsexist, we should be able to find them in information systems in general,not just human memory; for example, the laws should be visible in thestatistics of books requested at a library or the files retrieved in a computer.Information scientists have discovered several of these laws. Apiece of information that has been requested many times in the past ismore likely to be needed now than a piece that has been requested onlyrarely. A piece that has been requested recently is more likely to beneeded now than a piece that has not been requested for a while. Anoptimal information-retrieval system should therefore be biased to fetchfrequently and recently encountered items. Anderson notes that that isexactly what human memory retrieval does: we remember common andrecent events better than rare and long-past events. He found four otherclassic phenomena in memory research that meet the optimal design criteriaindependently established for computer information-retrieval systems.A third notable feature of access-consciousness is the emotional coloringof experience. We not only register events but register them aspleasurable or painful. That makes us take steps to have more of the formerand less of the latter, now and in the future. None of this is a mystery.Computationally speaking, representations trigger goal states, whichin turn trigger information-gathering, problem-solving, and behaviorselectingdemons that calculate how to attain, shun, or modify thecharged situation. And evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mysteryin why we seek the goals we seek—why, for example, people wouldrather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the bellywith a wet fish. The things that become objects of desire are the kinds ofthings that led, on average, to enhanced odds of survival and reproductionin the environment in which we evolved: water, food, safety, sex, status,mastery over the environment, and the well-being of children,friends, and kin.The fourth feature of consciousness is the funneling of control to anexecutive process: something we experience as the self, the will, the "I."The self has been under assault lately. The mind is a society of agents,according to the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. It's a large