Marvin Minsky Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

Marvin Minsky
In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.

Marvin Minsky
When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.

Marvin Minsky
Changing the states of many agents grossly alters behavior, while changing only a few just perturbs the overall disposition a little.

Marvin Minsky
Our eyes are always flashing sudden flicks of different pictures to our brains, yet none of that saccadic action leads to any sense of change or motion in the world; each thing reposes calmly in its "place"!... What makes us such innate Copernicans?

Marvin Minsky
A memory should induce a state through which we see current reality as an instance of the remembered event — or equivalently, see the past as an instance of the present.... the system can perform a computation analogous to one from the memorable past, but sensitive to present goals and circumstances.

Marvin Minsky
Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.

Marvin Minsky
If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all other things we know. Well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that's what we mean by thinking!

Marvin Minsky
Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.

Marvin Minsky
Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves — apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge — and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers — but not to us as psychologists — because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.

Marvin Minsky
An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.

Marvin Minsky
If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler! The theory of the roots of equations seemed hard for centuries within its little world of real numbers, but it suddenly seemed simple once Gauss exposed the larger world of so-called complex numbers. Similarly, music should make more sense once seen through listeners' minds.

Marvin Minsky
I maintain that attitudes do really precede propositions, feelings come before facts.

Marvin Minsky
What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.

Marvin Minsky
One's present personality cannot share all the thoughts of one's older personalities — and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self — a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help.

Marvin Minsky
Music... immerses us in seemingly stable worlds! How can this be, when there is so little of it present at each moment?

Marvin Minsky
We find things that do not fit into familiar frameworks hard to understand – such things seem meaningless.

Marvin Minsky
If there's something you like very much then you should regard this not as you feeling good but as a kind of brain cancer, because it means that some small part of your mind has figured out how to turn off all the other things.

Marvin Minsky
The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Marvin Minsky
Most adults have some childlike fascination for making and arranging larger structures out of smaller ones.

Marvin Minsky
Innate sentic detectors could help by teaching children about their own affective states. For if distinct signals arouse specific states, the child can associate those signals with those states. Just knowing that such states exist, that is, having symbols for them, is half the battle.

Marvin Minsky
Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be "deeper" in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason.

Marvin Minsky
Unless we can explain the mind in terms of things that have no thoughts or feelings of their own, we'll only have gone around in a circle.

Marvin Minsky
Get the mind into the (partial) state that solved the old problem; then it might handle the new problem in the "same way."

Marvin Minsky
It would seem that making unusual connections is unusually difficult and, often, rather "indirect"—be it via words, images, or whatever. The bizarre structures used by mnemonist (and, presumably unknowingly, by each of us) suggests that arbitrary connections require devious pathways.

Marvin Minsky
Since we have no systematic way to avoid all the inconsistencies of commonsense logic, each person must find his own way by building a private collection of "cognitive censors" to suppress the kinds of mistakes he has discovered in the past.

Marvin Minsky
Hearing music is like viewing scenery and... when we hear good music our minds react in very much the same way they do when we see things.

Marvin Minsky
We still remain prone to doctrines, philosophies, faiths, and beliefs that spread through the populations of entire civilizations. It is hard to imagine any foolproof ways to protect ourselves from such infections.... the best we can do is to try to educate our children to learn more skills of critical thinking and methods of scientific verification.

Marvin Minsky
The "laws of thought" depend not only on the property of brain cells, but also on how they are connected. And these connections are established not by the basic, "general" laws of physics... To be sure, "general" laws apply to everything. But, for that very reason, they can rarely explain anything in particular.... Each higher level of description must add to our knowledge about lower levels.

Marvin Minsky
I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning. In particular, I doubt that any logic that prohibits self-reference can be adequate for psychology: no mind can have enough power — without the power to think about Thinking itself. Without Self-Reference it would seem immeasurably harder to achieve Self-Consciousness — which, so far as I can see, requires at least some capacity to reflect on what it does. If Russell shattered our hopes for making a completely reliable version of commonsense reasoning, still we can try to find the islands of "local consistency," in which naive reasoning remains correct.

Marvin Minsky