Author David Gelernter visited Google's office in Cambridge, MA to discuss his book "The Tides of Mind: Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness". The book is an exploration of the human psyche that shows how the purpose of the mind changes throughout the day. Gelernter explains that, when we are at our most alert, when reasoning and creating new memories is our main mental business, the mind is a computer-like machine that keeps emotion on a short leash and attention on our surroundings. As we gradually tire, however, and descend the "mental spectrum," reasoning comes unglued. Memory ranges more freely, the mind wanders, and daydreams grow more insistent. Self-awareness fades, reflection blinks out, and at last we are completely immersed in our own minds. David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale. In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system.

Comments

1. Anyone who believes that one day humans will invent machines looking like us are dreaming
2. Here he says more clearly why emotions are important - he says they label information and guide the creation of analogies
   
   https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/theres-enough-time-to-change-everything/517209/
   
   "What makes emotion crucial?
   
   We’re capable of assembling two basic kinds of mental sequence, but we tend to ignore one of them. The logical sequence is well-known—we work our ways from some problem or starting point to a solution, explanation, plan of action. This is reasoning, broadly speaking. We assemble ideas using the rules of informal logic. But we also assemble sequences of feelings—sensations and emotions. (Usually such sequences assemble themselves: we enter some new environment and sensations arrive, observations occur to us, and often we respond emotionally.) Logical ideas tend to be stepping-stones to our mental destination. Feelings, on the other hand, tend to be “translucent”—we can overlay them and see through a whole stack of them, although each element adds some color or special effect to the ensemble. We tend to bring such feelings to bear not one-by-one, stepping-stone-wise, but all at once.
   
   
   Assembling a sequence or a stack of feelings tends to yield one particular, highly-specific feeling—incorporating aspects of many different emotions and sensations. We tend to label memories with particular, specific emotions; some memories consist entirely of a stack of feelings. How do we decide quickly (using emotion, not analysis or reasoning) that we like some applicant and want to hire him, dislike someone else, like or dislike a book that we’ve barely started, or are fascinated by a sight or a room or house or painting that we’ve only just glanced at? These abilities suggest to many psychologists and philosophers that emotions are a “parallel mind,” alongside the analytical, reasonable mind. But how does the parallel mind work?
   
   How do emotions yield judgments so quickly? Judgments we’re often at a loss to explain, except post facto, but that are often right?
   
   Say we meet someone, start a book, wander into a forest path, look at a building. In this new “environment,” our sensations, observations and emotions pile up. Suppose we now examine these feelings all at once, as if we were gazing through a stack of translucent images. If we use this highly-specific, specialized, multi-element feeling as a memory cue, we tend to recall episodes associated with roughly the same set of sensations and emotions. When we pull out of memory a recollection associated with the same sort of feelings we’re experiencing now… it’s natural to apply the outcome or conclusion or analysis we arrived at then. And that’s (in briefest outline) how emotions work as a “parallel mind,” how they lead us to fast conclusions we can’t necessarily explain--but they feel right. It all depends not on a step-by-step logical sequence but on a step-by-step emotional one.
   
   
   A similar mechanism allows the mind to link together far apart, radically-different memories, which share something deep although they seem to share little or nothing, yielding a brand-new analogy, which in turns yields a mental “restructuring” or a new way to look at things, which in turn yields an original invention or viewpoint. That’s how one important type of creativity works—or at least, how it starts."
3. Gelernter doesn't make the most convincing argument.
   A cadaver does NOT have ANY so-called mind.
   Behaviorist B. F. Skinner made the same argument against all causative mind for his entire career.
4. he keeps saying things will never happen . More like a lazy government guy than a scientist
5. It would be nice to hear any explanation from all these down-voters.