# Society of Mind **Author:** [[Marvin Minsky]] **Published:** 1986 **Domain:** Cognitive Architecture / Artificial Intelligence / Philosophy of Mind **Doc Type:** Source-Work and Concept Node **Maturity:** Developed **Related:** [[Distributed Intelligence]], [[Superorganism]], [[Artificial Intelligence]], [[Team Leela]] --- ## Definition _**The Society of Mind**_ is [[Marvin Minsky|Marvin Minsky’s]] account of intelligence as the organized activity of many relatively limited processes or agents. Capabilities that appear unified at the level of the person can emerge from coordination, competition, correction and hierarchy among components that are not individually intelligent in the same sense. ## Corpus Function The model supplies a cognitive precursor to [[Distributed Intelligence]] and a disciplined comparison for [[Superorganism]]. It also requires an evidence boundary: a cognitive agent in Minsky’s theory is not automatically a conscious person or political citizen. For Bryant, reading the book in 1998 was a formative event behind [[Team Leela]] and the later idea that machine intelligence may arise as an ecology of interacting capacities rather than as a single monolithic program. ## Key Insight **The unity of intelligence may be an achievement of organization rather than the property of one indivisible faculty.** ## Sources / Provenance - [[articles/STEVE|STEVE]] - [MIT archive — Marvin Minsky](https://web.mit.edu/dxh/www/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/index.html)