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“[People] like themselves just as they are,” says Marvin Minsky. “Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don’t much like how people are now. We’re too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves.”

Marvin believes that it is important that we “understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we’ll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don’t—and bit by bit we’ll rebuild ourselves.”

Marvin Minsky is the leading light of AI—artificial intelligence, that is. He sees the brain as a myriad of structures. Scientists who, like Minsky, take the strong AI view believe that a computer model of the brain will be able to explain what we know of the brain’s cognitive abilities. Minsky identifies consciousness with high-level, abstract thought, and believes that in principle machines can do everything a conscious human being can do.

People have long noticed that the waters around Cabo Frio are unusually cool.

When European explorers first surveyed the coastline of what is now the state of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1500s, they encountered white sands, turquoise waters, shallow lagoons, and lush green mountains rising from the sea. The waters in one area, however, were unusually cool—so much so that the promontory in southeastern Brazil shown above was named Cabo Frio, Portuguese for “Cape Cold.”

Landsat 9’s OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) captured this image of Cabo Frio’s diverse coastline on September 16, 2023. The map (below) shows that surface waters that day were cooler off of Cabo Frio than in the surrounding waters. The pattern is common: Upwelling of cold water from deeper in the ocean to the surface often chills Cabo Frio’s surface waters by several degrees.