Marvin Minsky (2006), The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind, New York: Simon & Schuster (hardback, ISBN 0-7432-7663-9; Library of Congress 2006044367; 387 pp., bibliography pp. [361]–372, index; on sale 7 November 2006 by Open Library’s edition record). A Simon & Schuster paperback followed in 2007.
Key takeaways
From the 2005 draft, read in full (NOTE-348):
- Emotions are Ways to Think. Each major emotional state “results from turning certain resources on while turning certain others off”. Anger, for example, speeds reaction and suppresses prudence and planning. The “intellectual” Ways to Think are selected the same way. So the line between emotion and thought is not one of kind (Introduction, §1-5).
- Critics and Selectors. Critics recognise a type of problem or obstacle, outside or inside the mind. Selectors switch on the resources for a Way to Think suited to it. The draft lists Ways to Think (analogy, divide and conquer, reformulation, simulation and more) and Critics at each level. It gives no systematic catalogue of either, and says none exists yet (§§7-3 to 7-5).
- Six levels. Instinctive reactions, learned reactions, deliberation, reflection, self-reflection and self-conscious reflection (“Model Six”). It admits the boundaries “are indistinct” (§§5-1 to 5-6).
- Suitcase words. “Consciousness”, “emotion”, “love”, “pain” and “pleasure” each pack many processes. Chapter 4 lists 27 things Joan “did” in crossing a street that the word “conscious” might cover. Feelings are hard to describe because they are complex, not because they are simple (§§4-2, 9-6, 9-7).
- The Self is a network of models. Thinking of “your Self” is switching among many partial self-models. The “Single-Self” view is a useful fiction that blocks questions about how minds work (§§1-2, 9-1 to 9-3).
- Learning goals from others. “Imprimers” are the people a child is attached to. Their praise and blame change the child’s goals, not only its methods. Minsky marks this as “only theories of mine” (chapter 2).
- Representation. Panalogies link analogous descriptions across realms, so a mind can switch views without starting over. K-lines remember a Way to Think by re-activating the resources that were in use. Frames have default slot values. Numerical representations, as in neural networks and statistical learning, are “opaque” to reflection (§§6-1, 8-3, 8-4, 8-7).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-01 at the owner’s request for Minsky’s Society of Mind programme. It is the programme’s last book. No anthology topic holds it: its subject is the architecture of the human mind and the place of emotion in it. Its claims about machine learning (§§6-2 and 8-7) are 2005 arguments that numerical representations block reflective thinking. They are not instructions for practice, so it stays here, but see “Bearing on the record” in the note.
It carries the book it follows further, which is the extends: relation to
The Society of Mind (LIT-429). The draft says so itself. Its
introduction renames that book’s “agents” as “resources” and explains why.
It sends the reader back to that book’s chapters for the details of
K-lines, frames, panalogies and verbal expression (§§6-1, 8-4, 8-7, and the
endnotes of chapters 4 and 7 to 9). It does not restate them.
The brief for this filing expected emotion-and-affect to apply, and it
does. It comes second, after cognition: most of the draft (chapters 4 to
9) is about thinking, and its claim about emotion is a claim that emotion is
a kind of thinking.
Against Damasio. This record holds Antonio Damasio’s account of emotion (LIT-383 to LIT-388). The draft disagrees with it, and says so, on one point: what an emotion is made of.
- For Damasio, emotions are body states, or their simulation in an “as if” loop. Somatic markers are learned links from situations to those states, and they bias decision (LIT-384). Feelings are the mind’s experience of body states, reporting homeostatic value (LIT-388), and feelings are the source of consciousness (LIT-387).
- Minsky makes the body “just one more set of resources to exploit” (§3-8). His Introduction says his chapter 7 “will take the opposite view” to the popular one in which “emotions are deeply involved with our bodies’ conditions”.
- His §7-6 grants William James part of the bodily theory. Bodily expression could act as an “external memory” that keeps an emotional state going long enough to grow. But he holds that the process “must begin with activities that start in your brain before your body reacts”. He warns that “exaggerating the body’s role in emotions can lead to serious misconceptions”, and he ends: “it’s the brain that sits in the driver’s seat”.
- On Damasio’s patient Elliot (Descartes’ Error), §7-2 proposes “this opposite view”. Elliot’s loss of decision-making could have reduced his emotions, rather than reduced emotion degrading his decisions. Damage to the Critics that set off emotional cascades would explain both. Minsky offers this as a possible reading and gives no evidence for it. The draft never discusses the gambling-task data (LIT-383) that Damasio’s side offers on the direction of cause.
- They agree on the larger point. Both deny that emotion and reason are separate faculties, or that a purely rational, emotion-free decision exists. Minsky calls that “a myth”.
- They also part on feeling and consciousness. For Damasio, feeling grounds consciousness. For Minsky, a feeling is a high-level attempt to describe a mental condition, and it depends on reflective self-models (§§3-3, 9-6). So the dependence runs the other way.
The NOTE sets out the comparison claim by claim.
Other neighbours, described in the note:
- Collective intelligence and group minds. §9-5 rejects a “human community” or company model of the mind, because brain parts are too specialised to be employees. Pilgrim et al. (LIT-046) and Schwitzgebel (LIT-159) build on capable parts.
- Global workspace. §4-6 takes up Baars’s global workspace and says the mind needs “a great deal more architectural structure” than a bulletin board. Global workspace theory is one source of the indicators in Butlin et al. (LIT-056).
- Suitcase words. The term in Safron’s editorial (LIT-195), read in NOTE-136, is cited to this book (its reference 22: “The emotion machine”, 2007, the paperback). So NOTE-136 already names this work.