Reminds me of when I took "The Philosophy of Cognitive Science" in college. The entire class was on AI. When I asked the professor why, she explained: "You don't understand something unless you can build it".
It's cool to learn that quote might have been because she's a fan of Minsky.
> In terms of the root idea of the mind being a huge number of concurrent agents, I think he was close to the bullseye and it very much aligns with what you wrote.
I think you're right here and I'd like to add a bit. One common mistake people make when thinking of evolution, is where in the hierarchy it takes place. In other words, they misidentify the agents by an order of magnitude.
For example, in biology I commonly see it taught that the individual is the subject of natural selection (or worse, the population).
Really, it's the gene. The beauty of evolution is that it can take an agent as simple as the gene and shape it into the litany of complex forms and functions we see all around us.
If evolution is at play in the brain, I suspect that Minsky's agents are the individual firing patterns. Like genes, the base of the hierarchy, the fundamental unit. Also like genes, they slowly build increasingly complex behaviors from the ground up. Starting before birth and continuing for most of our lives.