Marvin Minsky - Making Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Marvin Minsky