"To explain the mind, we have to show how minds are built from mindless stuff, from parts that are much smaller and simpler than anything we'd consider smart." Otherwise, we wind up stuck in Ryle's Regress, or the homunculus problem.
Minsky provides a list of 14 different questions, all of which are of great interest to psychologists and cognitive scientists, and all of which appear to be extremely difficult to answer. Minsky's point, though, is that this difficulty is due in part to viewing these questions in isolation. When we see all of these questions as being interrelated -- which presumably occurs naturally from the Society of Mind perspective -- answers to one question will illuminate the others.
One thing to note here: the underlying theme is similar to Simon's (1969) book The sciences of the artificial and to Braitenberg's (1983??) book Vehicles. Both of these books stress the point that simple systems, when placed in a complex environment (which might be complex because of the presence of other simple systems), produce complex, interesting, and surprising phenomena.
The second thing to note is this -- at the end of the book, we should come back to this set of questions, and see the extent to which the Society of Mind perspective has illuminated their answers!
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