"In a complex human brain, a great many layers of agencies are interposed between the ones that deal with body needs and those that rerpesent or recognize 0our intellectual accomplishments. Then what is the significance, in these more complicated systems, of those pleasant feelings of accomplishment and disagreeable sensations of defeat? They must be involved with how our higher-level agencies make summaries." (Q: Is a major goal of higher-level agents to make summaries? Or do their behaviors merely permit us to interpret them as summarizers?)
"The only way to solve hard problems is by breaking them into smaller ones and then, when those are too difficult, dividing them in turn. So hard problems always lead to branching trees of subgoals and subproblems. To decide where resources should be applied, our problem-solving agents need simple summaries of how things are going." (NB: Relate this to the practice of functional analysis!) (NB: Minsky is arguing that summaries oversimplify, hiding internal complexity -- but are still necessary. This makes me think of ideas like cognitive economy and stereotypes, and their role in cognitive theories.)
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