MIT, autumn 2011. Four years before his death, an eighty-four-year-old man explained, on camera, why the self you feel yourself to be is an illusion built out of stupid parts. Then he showed you which ones.

Marvin Minsky co-founded the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1959, with John McCarthy. He won the Turing Award in 1969. He built a robotic arm in the late sixties that used a camera and a computer to stack blocks, and it was that work, trying to make a machine pick things up, that pushed him toward the question of what a mind actually is.

He was also the technical adviser on 2001: A Space Odyssey, and he is named inside the film itself.

The course is 6.868, The Society of Mind. There is no single thinker inside your head, he tells the room. What you experience as one continuous self is the output of a large number of small processes, none of which is intelligent, none of which understands what it is doing, and most of which are arguing.

Intelligence, on his account, is not a thing. It is what a crowd of stupid mechanisms looks like from the outside once they are organised well enough to argue their way to an answer.

Then he spends thirteen lectures naming the crowd.

Consciousness. Emotion. Pain. Why an infant cries. Why you can be in two minds about something, literally, because on his account you are made of minds, plural, and disagreement between them is not a malfunction.

One lecture is called From Panic to Suffering. Another asks what consciousness is, and argues the question itself is badly formed, which is a stranger claim than saying it is hard.

He teaches it the way an old man tells stories. No slides marching forward, no script. He wanders, digresses, follows a thought sideways for ten minutes, and lands somewhere you did not expect.

This is the last recording of the course. Minsky died in January 2016, at eighty-eight.

It is free. Thirteen lectures, the readings, the assignments, and the book the course is built on, which he put on his own website. No login, no cohort, no waitlist.

What it costs you is the sense that there is someone in there running the show. By the end, he has replaced that someone with a committee, and told you what sits on it.