Book Summary - Thinking - the new science of decision making

1 The normal well-tempered mind (Daniel Dennett)

• deconstruction technique is usually applied to understand the Mind. Break stuff down until simple structures are found that can be replaced by machines. Neurons in this case.
• Turns out Neurons are more complex than we thought. They’re like little agents and can form coalitions and fight other groups for control.
• even at the level of genes, there are complex interactions like these.
• so the Mind is like an anarchy/chaotic state rather than orderly machine.
• an organized mind is an achievement. A goal to yearn for.
• recent explosion of big data accelerate research. However need more analytic capabilities.
• previously a popular brain model is a logic gate if/then/else. Now it’s a massively parallel fuzzy machine.
• Control is key to understanding. How do you control a parallel system. Obviously not from top - down.