Minsky wants to explain how minds work -- how intelligence can emerge from nonintelligence. His perspective is "the Society of Mind": the mind is comprised of agents, which are processes that do very simple (thoughtless) things. "Yet when we join these agents in societies -- in certain very special ways -- this leads to true intelligence."
Minsky's aim is to perform a functional analysis of the mind, sketching out its basic structure first, and filling in the specifics later (possibly modifying the structure too). The structure of the book is geared to reflect (and perhaps to emphasize) this general theme.
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