Why do our minds continue to function, even as they change? Most machines that we build would certainly not work! Minsky suggests several reasons: duplication (see also Medler & Dawson, 1994!), self-repair, distributed processes, and accumulation.
Of these, accumulation strikes me as a new concept. With it, "each agent tends to accumulate a family of subagents that can accomplish that agent's goals in several ways. Later, if any of those subagents become impaired, their supervisor will still be able to accomplish its job, because other of its subagents will remain to do that job, albeit in different ways."
(NB: Lots of this stuff could have come right out of the PDP'86 bibles, with the exception of accumulation -- connectionists rarely talk about alternative strategies, with a system capable of switching from one to another!)
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