Re: Society Of Mind Ebook Free Download
Raingarda Krzynowek
And the full reference could be this, assuming you continue to use et al in your reference list: Cole, M. et al. (eds.) (1978) L.S. Vygotsky: Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. London: Harvard University Press.
Marvin Minsky is Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has led to many advances in artificial intelligence, psychology, physical optics, mathematics, and the theory of computation. He has made major contributions in the domains of computer graphics, knowledge and semantics, machine vision, and machine learning. He has also been involved with technologies for space exploration.
Professor Minsky is one of the pioneers of intelligence-based robotics. He designed and built some of the first mechanical hands with tactile sensors, visual scanners, and their software and interfaces. In 1951 he built the first neural-network learning machine. With John McCarthy he founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959. He has written seminal papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, perception, and language. His book The Society of Mind contains hundreds of ideas about the mind, many of which he has further developed in this book.
Gilbert is a famous Harvard psychologist who has a knack for coming up with zany experiments that show just how flawed and biased the human mind is. In the book, he shows you time and again that as humans, we inaccurately judge, among other things, what made us happy in the past, what will make us happy in the future, and even what is making us happy right at this moment.
Seven years after the death of his wife, Mill was invited to contestWestminster. His feeling on the conduct of elections made him refuse totake any personal action in the matter, and he gave the frankestexpression to his political views, but nevertheless he was elected by alarge majority. He was not a conventional success in the House; as aspeaker he lacked magnetism. But his influence was widely felt. "For thesake of the House of Commons at large," said Mr. Gladstone, "I rejoicedin his advent and deplored his disappearance. He did us all good." Afteronly three years in Parliament, he was defeated at the next GeneralElection by Mr. W. H. Smith. He retired to Avignon, to the pleasantlittle house where the happiest years of his life had been spent in thecompanionship of his wife, and continued his disinterested labours. Hecompleted his edition of his father's Analysis of the Mind, and alsoproduced, in addition to less important work, The Subjection of Women,in which he had the active co-operation of his step-daughter. A book onSocialism was under consideration, but, like an earlier study ofSociology, it never was written. He died in 1873, his last years beingspent peacefully in the pleasant society of his[Pg xi] step-daughter, fromwhose tender care and earnest intellectual sympathy he caught maybe afar-off reflection of the light which had irradiated his spiritual life.
Mrs. Taylor's assistance in the Political Economy is confined tocertain definite points. The purely scientific part was, we are assured,not learnt from her. "But it was chiefly her influence which gave to thebook that general tone by which it is distinguished from all previousexpositions of political economy that had any pretensions to bescientific, and which has made it so useful in conciliating minds whichthose previous expositions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly inmaking the proper distinction between the laws of the production ofwealth, which are real laws of Nature, dependent on the properties ofobjects, and the modes of its distribution, which, subject to certainconditions, depend on human will.... I had indeed partially learnt thisview of things from the thoughts awakened in me by the speculations ofSt. Simonians; but it was made a living principle, pervading andanimating the book, by my wife's promptings."[4] The part which isitalicised is noticeable. Here, as elsewhere, Mill thinks out the matterby himself; the concrete form of the thoughts is suggested or promptedby the wife. Apart from this "general tone," Mill tells us that therewas a[Pg xx] specific contribution. "The chapter which has had a greaterinfluence on opinion than all the rest, that on the Probable Future ofthe Labouring Classes, is entirely due to her. In the first draft of thebook that chapter did not exist. She pointed out the need of such achapter, and the extreme imperfection of the book without it; she wasthe cause of my writing it." From this it would appear that she gaveMill that tendency to Socialism which, while it lends a progressivespirit to his speculations on politics, at the same time does notmanifestly accord with his earlier advocacy of peasant proprietorships.Nor, again, is it, on the face of it, consistent with those doctrines ofindividual liberty which, aided by the intellectual companionship of hiswife, he propounded in a later work. The ideal of individual freedom isnot the ideal of Socialism, just as that invocation of governmental aidto which the Socialist resorts is not consistent with the theory oflaisser-faire. Yet Liberty was planned by Mill and his wife inconcert. Perhaps a slight visionariness of speculation was no less theattribute of Mrs. Mill than an absence of rigid logical principles. Bethis as it may, she undoubtedly checked the half-recognised leanings[Pg xxi] ofher husband in the direction of Coleridge and Carlyle. Whether this wasan instance of her steadying influence,[5] or whether it added one moreunassimilated element to Mill's diverse intellectual sustenance, may bewisely left an open question. We cannot, however, be wrong inattributing to her the parentage of one book of Mill, The Subjection ofWomen. It is true that Mill had before learnt that men and women oughtto be equal in legal, political, social, and domestic relations. Thiswas a point on which he had already fallen foul of his father's essay onGovernment. But Mrs. Taylor had actually written on this very point,and the warmth and fervour of Mill's denunciations of women's servitudewere unmistakably caught from his wife's view of the practicaldisabilities entailed by the feminine position.
The subject of this Essay is not the so-called Liberty of the Will, sounfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of PhilosophicalNecessity; but Civil, or Social Liberty: the nature and limits of thepower which can be legitimately exercised by society over theindividual. A question seldom stated, and hardly ever discussed, ingeneral terms, but which profoundly influences the practicalcontroversies of the age by its latent presence, and is likely soon tomake itself recognised as the vital question of the future. It is so farfrom being new, that in a certain sense, it has divided mankind, almostfrom the remotest ages; but in the stage of progress into which the morecivilised portions of the species have now[Pg 2] entered, it presents itselfunder new conditions, and requires a different and more fundamental treatment.
But, in political and philosophical theories, as[Pg 6] well as in persons,success discloses faults and infirmities which failure might haveconcealed from observation. The notion, that the people have no need tolimit their power over themselves, might seem axiomatic, when populargovernment was a thing only dreamed about, or read of as having existedat some distant period of the past. Neither was that notion necessarilydisturbed by such temporary aberrations as those of the FrenchRevolution, the worst of which were the work of a usurping few, andwhich, in any case, belonged, not to the permanent working of popularinstitutions, but to a sudden and convulsive outbreak againstmonarchical and aristocratic despotism. In time, however, a democraticrepublic came to occupy a large portion of the earth's surface, and madeitself felt as one of the most powerful members of the community ofnations; and elective and responsible government became subject to theobservations and criticisms which wait upon a great existing fact. Itwas now perceived that such phrases as "self-government," and "the powerof the people over themselves," do not express the true state of thecase. The "people" who exercise the power are not always the same peoplewith those over whom it is exercised; and the "self-government" spokenof[Pg 7] is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all therest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will ofthe most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority,or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority: thepeople, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number;and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any otherabuse of power. The limitation, therefore, of the power of governmentover individuals, loses none of its importance when the holders of powerare regularly accountable to the community, that is, to the strongestparty therein. This view of things, recommending itself equally to theintelligence of thinkers and to the inclination of those importantclasses in European society to whose real or supposed interestsdemocracy is adverse, has had no difficulty in establishing itself; andin political speculations "the tyranny of the majority" is now generallyincluded among the evils against which society requires to be on its guard.
The likings and dislikings of society, or of some powerful portion ofit, are thus the main thing which has practically determined the ruleslaid down for general observance, under the penalties[Pg 13] of law oropinion. And in general, those who have been in advance of society inthought and feeling have left this condition of things unassailed inprinciple, however they may have come into conflict with it in some ofits details. They have occupied themselves rather in inquiring whatthings society ought to like or dislike, than in questioning whether itslikings or dislikings should be a law to individuals. They preferredendeavouring to alter the feelings of mankind on the particular pointson which they were themselves heretical, rather than make common causein defence of freedom, with heretics generally. The only case in whichthe higher ground has been taken on principle and maintained withconsistency, by any but an individual here and there, is that ofreligious belief: a case instructive in many ways, and not least so asforming a most striking instance of the fallibility of what is calledthe moral sense: for the odium theologicum, in a sincere bigot, is oneof the most unequivocal cases of moral feeling. Those who first brokethe yoke of what called itself the Universal Church, were in general aslittle willing to permit difference of religious opinion as that churchitself. But when the heat of the conflict was over, without giving acomplete victory to any party, and each church or[Pg 14] sect was reduced tolimit its hopes to retaining possession of the ground it alreadyoccupied; minorities, seeing that they had no chance of becomingmajorities, were under the necessity of pleading to those whom theycould not convert, for permission to differ. It is accordingly on thisbattle-field, almost solely, that the rights of the individual againstsociety have been asserted on broad grounds of principle, and the claimof society to exercise authority over dissentients, openly controverted.The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty itpossesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasibleright, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to othersfor his religious belief. Yet so natural to mankind is intolerance inwhatever they really care about, that religious freedom has hardlyanywhere been practically realised, except where religious indifference,which dislikes to have its peace disturbed by theological quarrels, hasadded its weight to the scale. In the minds of almost all religiouspersons, even in the most tolerant countries, the duty of toleration isadmitted with tacit reserves. One person will bear with dissent inmatters of church government, but not of dogma; another can tolerateeverybody, short of[Pg 15] a Papist or a Unitarian; another, every one whobelieves in revealed religion; a few extend their charity a littlefurther, but stop at the belief in a God and in a future state. Whereverthe sentiment of the majority is still genuine and intense, it is foundto have abated little of its claim to be obeyed.
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