Even acts that seem simple, like "pick up a cup of tea", can be described as cooperation (and competition) among a large number of different agents. For example, Minsky posits that this simple act involves (at least) GRASPING, BALANCING, THIRST, and MOVING agents.
"Yet none of these consume your mind as you roam about the room talking to your friends...Why not? Because they can depend upon one another. If each does its own little job, the really beig job will get done by all of them together: drinking tea."
Huge numbers of processes must be involved in such simple acts, but none appear to require much thought. Even talk itself doesn't require much conscious effort. But underneath there is a lot of deep complexity. "These processes actually involve more machinery than anyone can understand all at once."
So, Minsky's move is to perform a functional analysis (a la Cummins, 1983) on a very simple, ordinary activity -- making things with children's building blocks. "Our study of how to build with blocks will be like focusing a microscope on the simplest objects we can find, to open up a great and unexpected universe."
(NB: We can ask ourselves whether it is really the case that, for the mind, "one can learn the most by studying what seems the least." Nevertheless, this is indeed the practice followed by most cognitivists, and by most psychologists from other schools of thought.)
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