Marvin Minsky Quotes

68 Sourced Quotes

We usually say that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things?

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

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
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
How do both music and vision build things in our minds? Eye motions show us real objects; phrases show us musical objects. We "learn" a room with bodily motions; large musical sections show us musical "places." Walks and climbs move us from room to room; so do transitions between musical sections. Looking back in vision is like recapitulation in music; both give us time, at certain points, to reconfirm or change our conceptions of the whole.

Marvin Minsky
For avoiding nonsense in general, we might accumulate millions of censors. For all we know, this "negative meta-knowledge" — about patterns of thought and inference that have been found defective or harmful — may be a large portion of all we know.

Marvin Minsky
We shall envision the mind (or brain) as composed of many partially autonomous "agents"—as a "Society" of smaller minds.... It is easiest to think about partial states that constrain only agents within a single Division....(we suggest) the local mechanisms for resolving conflicts could be the precursors of what we know later as reasoning — useful ways to combine different fragments of knowledge.

Marvin Minsky
Each subsociety of mind must have its own internal epistemology and phenomenology, with most details private, not only from the central processes, but from one another.

Marvin Minsky
In today's computer science curricula … almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design" — the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested — and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates.

Marvin Minsky
Perhaps the music that some call 'background' music can tranquilize by turning under-thoughts from bad to neutral, leaving the surface thoughts free of affect by diverting the unconscious.

Marvin Minsky
This book... too, is a society — of many small ideas. Each by itself is only common sense, yet when we join enough of them we explain the strangest mysteries of mind.

Marvin Minsky
I suspect our human "thinking processes" often "break down," but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced.

Marvin Minsky
Concrete concepts are not necessarily the simplest ones. A novice best remembers "being at" a concert. The amateur remembers more of what it "sounded like." Only the professional remembers the music itself, timbres, tones and textures.

Marvin Minsky
Of what use is musical knowledge? Here is one idea. Each child spends endless days in curious ways; we call this play. A child stacks and packs all kinds of blocks and boxes, lines them up, and knocks them down. … Clearly, the child is learning about space!... how on earth does one learn about time? Can one time fit inside another? Can two of them go side by side? In music, we find out!

Marvin Minsky
It makes no sense to seek a single best way to represent knowledge-because each particular form of expression also brings its particular limitations. For example, logic-based systems are very precise, but they make it hard to do reasoning with analogies. Similarly, statistical systems are useful for making predictions, but do not serve well to represent the reasons why those predictions are sometimes correct.

Marvin Minsky
Only the surface of reason is rational. I don't mean that understanding emotion is easy, only that understanding reason is probably harder.

Marvin Minsky
When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.

Marvin Minsky
What is the difference between merely knowing (or remembering, or memorizing) and understanding?... A thing or idea seems meaningful only when we have several different ways to represent it — different perspectives and different associations.... Then we can turn it around in our minds, so to speak: however it seems at the moment, we can see it another way and we never come to a full stop. In other words, we can 'think' about it. If there were only one way to represent this thing or idea, we would not call this representation thinking.

Marvin Minsky
Theorems often tell us complex truths about the simple things, but only rarely tell us simple truths about the complex ones. To believe otherwise is wishful thinking or "mathematics envy."

Marvin Minsky
Intelligence is not the product of any singular mechanism but comes from the managed interaction of a diverse variety of resourceful agents.

Marvin Minsky
Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.

Marvin Minsky
Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.

Marvin Minsky
When you "get an idea," or "solve a problem," or have a "memorable experience," you create what we shall call a K-line. This K-line gets connected to those "mental agencies" that were actively involved in the memorable event. When that K-line is later "activated," it reactivates some of those mental agencies, creating a "partial mental state" resembling the original.

Marvin Minsky
We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door.

Marvin Minsky
If you like somebody's work — just go and see them. However, don't ask for their autograph. A lot of people came and asked me for my autograph — and it's creepy. What I did is read everything they published first... and correct them. That's what they really want. Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired.

Marvin Minsky
Perhaps it is no accident that one meaning of the word express is "to squeeze"—for when you try to "express yourself," your language resources will have to pick and choose among the descriptions your other resources construct—and then attempt to squeeze a few of these through your tiny channels of phrases and gestures.

Marvin Minsky
For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles — with virtually no success. I suspect this enterprise failed because it was looking in the wrong direction: common sense works so well not because it is an approximation of logic; logic is only a small part of our great accumulation of different, useful ways to chain things together.

Marvin Minsky
Questioning one's own "top-level" goals always reveals the paradox-oscillation of ultimate purpose. How could one decide that a goal is worthwhile — unless one already knew what it is that is worthwhile?

Marvin Minsky
Most theories of learning have been based on ideas of "reinforcement" of success. But all these theories postulate a single, centralized reward mechanism. I doubt this could suffice for human learning because the recognition of which events should be considered memorable cannot be a single, uniform process. It requires too much "intelligence." Instead I think such recognitions must be made, for each division of the mind, by some other agency that has engaged the present one for a purpose.

Marvin Minsky
The way the mathematics game is played, most variations lie outside the rules, while music can insist on perfect canon or tolerate a casual accompaniment.

Marvin Minsky