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SYMPTOMS | PATHOMECHANISMS | HISTORY

History

Walter Clement Alvarez

Author: Klaus Podoll	14. July 2004
Edited by: Klaus Podoll

Marvin Minsky

Author's Website

Raising children as atheists

By Marvin Minsky

One day, at age 17, I was walking alone at night during a snowstorm in a singularly quiet place. I noticed that the ground looked further away than usual, and then it seems that I was looking down from a height of perhaps 10 meters, watching myself crossing the field.

Well, having some education, I recalled some descriptions of this fairly common type of hallucination, and exclaimed to myself, "how interesting; I seem to be having a mystical experience. I'd better put a stop to this right away, or I might experience a conversion or something," recalling some observations of William James. So I quickly ran over to a nearby dorm and started a social conversation with some students.

Another time, I forget the circumstances, I was looking at a tree and noticed that it was flickering strangely, sorta like a burning bush. In particular, I observed that it had acquired a sort of colorful, jagged, pulsating outline. "My goodness," I exclaimed to myself, "it would seem that I'm experiencing a scintillating scotoma, and it looks just like the picture I remember from Duke-Elder's Textbook of Ophthalmology. I'd better get ready for a migraine headache." (I had had what aseemed to be migraines before, but never with this phenomenon -- which was actually rather gratifying, because it confirmed an otherwise inconclusive diagnosis.) I always wondered if Moses (presuming that there ever was such a person) had migraines, too. Only a few such patients hear sounds as well.

Hubert Airy's illustration of scintillating scotoma from Sir W.S. Duke-Elder, Text-Book of Ophthalmology: Volume IV. Henry Kimpton, London 1949.

So let's add to the rest of this useful discussion a new point: make sure that your children learn about the 7 most common forms of mystical experience and whatever is known about their neurological mechanisms. ...

Of course this is good advice only for those who like their minds the way they are.

(Marvin Minsky, Newsgroups: alt.atheism,sci.skeptic, May 31, 1992)

"It's thrilling to see that old message again. I had forgotten about that 'burning bush.'

I will certainly link my website to yours! It looks like an interesting and useful project and will help remind some readers that there are many strange 'aliens' already among us.

In fact, the Duke-Elder textbook was first published around 1937. My father was an ophthalmologist at New York's Mt. Sinai Hospital, so I probably read it when I was about 10 years old.

I might add that I suffered from severe migraines about once a week between the ages of about 16 and 30, but the preceding scintillating scotomas only began in my early 20s. That's why those visual symptoms were a welcome event; it meant that there was no serious brain disease.

Curiously, those headaches usually came Thursdays on Fridays, and I have no hypothesis for the cause of this. Every physical motion made the pain worse, so I usually retired to lie down for some hours in a dark room. However, I did a great deal of thinking in those times, so I think I regarded this affliction as more gift than disability!"

(Email to Klaus Podoll, July 8, 2004)

Imagine a machine with migraine headaches

"The year 2000 will bring in not only a new millennium, but also the biggest computer migraine in history as the '00' will suddenly mean '1900' to the computer, not '2000.'"

(Hypertext, Vol. 10 No. 23, March 7, 1996)

"I wonder whether any of Marvin Minsky's artificial-intelligence computers ever had a migraine!"

(David Haas, Email to Klaus Podoll, February 3, 2005)

"An important kind of risk inherent in deep self-modification is for a machine to change its desires to a form it would originally have found regrettable, harmful, or even despicable. It might start a session of self-modification by looking for the secret of joy and end (like some Greek sages) deciding that tranquillity is superior to joy. This modification of desire en route to realizing it is easily classified as learning, and deserves our respect. But imagine the case of a machine hoping to make itself less narcissistic and more considerate of the interests of others, but ending by desiring to advance its own ends at the expense of others, even through violence. Or imagine a machine looking for a cure for its migraine headaches, botching its self-surgery, and emerging as a being who perversely cultivates migraine headaches. It still finds them insufferably painful, but it cannot refrain from creating the conditions that bring them about, much like an autistic child who spends its days banging its head against a wall. Again these could be side-effects of intentional changes or simple accidents."

(Peter Suber, Saving Machines From Themselves: The Ethics of Deep Self-Modification, 2002)

References

Duke-Elder WS. Text-Book of Ophthalmology: Volume. IV, The Neurology of Vision; Motor and Optical Anomalies. Henry Kimpton, London 1949.
James W. The varieties of religious experience. A study in human nature. Macmillan, New York-London 1961.

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