AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
I often wonder what Minsky would think of the Berkeley Rationalists. They share certain cultural biases – big nerds, with a grounding in the values of science fiction (pre-60s variety). Into transhumanist practices like cryogenic life extension, and not coincidentally militant atheists when it comes to traditional religion.
But Minsky was hardly a rationalist. He would be dead set against the monolithic Rationalist model of the mind as some sort of Bayesian optimizer – in his view, the mind was composed of a multiplicity of different kinds of machinery, interacting in complex ways. His most important predecessor was probably Freud, who nobody would accuse of being overly rationalist.
Minsky was also an engineer, he built things, invented physical devices (robots and microscopes). Perhaps I'm overgeneralizing but the Rationalists seem to mostly not be engineers, they tend to the abstract, to the merely mathematical.