转载自amazon.com:

Marvin Minsky -- one of the fathers of computer science and cofounder of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT -- gives a revolutionary answer to the age-old question: _How does the mind work?_

（马文。明斯基————电脑科学的鼻祖，麻省理工学院的人工智能实验室的创始人之一————在本书里对相传以久的问题，“思维是怎么一回事儿？”，做出了革命性的回答。）

Minsky brilliantly portrays the mind as a _society_ of tiny components that are themselves mindless. Mirroring his theory, Minsky boldly casts The Society of Mind as an intellectual puzzle whose pieces are assembled along the way. Each chapter -- on a self-contained page -- corresponds to a piece in the puzzle. As the pages turn, a unified theory of the mind emerges, like a mosaic. Ingenious, amusing, and easy to read, The Society of Mind is an adventure in imagination.

（明斯基的精彩理论把思维描画成由本身不具备思维的微小部件组成的“社会”。本书章节段落之间结构跟他的理论相呼应，每一页纸独立成为一章，讨论整个问题里的单个环节。翻过这一篇篇书页，关于思维的统一理论渐渐成型，《意识社会》一书妙趣横生，是在想象空间里的一场历险。）

Man has within a single generation found himself sharing the world with a strange new species: the computers and computer-like machines. Neither history, nor philosophy, nor common sense will tell us how these machines will affect us, for they do not do "work" as did machines of the Industrial Revolution. Instead of dealing with materials or energy, we are told that they handle "control" and "information" and even "intellectual processes." There are very few individuals today who doubt that the computer and its relatives are developing rapidly in capability and complexity, and that these machines are destined to play important (though not as yet fully understood) roles in society's future. Though only some of us deal directly with computers, all of us are falling under the shadow of their ever-growing sphere of influence, and thus we all need to understand their capabilities and their limitations. It would indeed be reassuring to have a book that categorically and systematically described what all these machines can do and what they cannot do, giving sound theoretical or practical grounds for each judgment. However, although some books have purported to do this, it cannot be done for the following reasons: a) Computer-like devices are utterly unlike anything which science has ever considered---we still lack the tools necessary to fully analyze, synthesize, or even think about them; and b) The methods discovered so far are effective in certain areas, but are developing much too rapidly to allow a useful interpretation and interpolation of results. The abstract theory---as described in this book---tells us in no uncertain terms that the machines' potential range is enormous, and that its theoretical limitations are of the subtlest and most elusive sort. There is no reason to suppose machines have any limitations not shared by man.