How do our minds form? "We'll start by envisioning a simple brain composed of separate `proto-specialists', each concerned with some important requirement, goal, or instinct like food, drink, shelter, comfort, or defense. But there are reasons why those systems must be merged." What reasons for merging? To allow control structure to deal with conflicts, and to get components to explot the knowledge of others. Furthermore, new goals must be learnned. "Consequently, our genes must build some sort of `general-purpose' machinery thourhg which individuals can acquire and transmit goals from one generation to another."
(NB: This is a crucial chapter, because I think here we are getting some proposals for primitives of the system. Specifically, I think that proto-specialists are Minsky's primitives. This is really intriguing to me, because these primitives really remind me a lot of some basic components of learning theory (drives/motivation); components which cognitivists have moved away from!)
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