Marvin Minsky - Ways Quotes

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

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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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