What is the best way to change the brain? Build a detour around the old, but don't remove the old until you are sure that the new route works. This suggests to Minsky an approach to adding new intermediate layers to hierarchies. New agents (and connections) form, and only later do existing structural links fade away.
(NB: First, do old agent interconnections simply wither away from disuse? could some variant of Hebb learning be used to produce this kind of modification of an agency? Second, this approach to learning intrigues me. It makes me wonder what would happen to, say, cascade correlation if the original connections in the network were not fixed after new processing units were added.)
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