Marvin Minsky Short Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvin Minsky
We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.

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

Marvin Minsky
How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.

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

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
Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

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

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
Most of our future attempts to build large, growing Articial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders.

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

Marvin Minsky
Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us.

Marvin Minsky
Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.

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
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
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
Positive general principles need always to be supplemented by negative, anecdotal censors. For, it hardly ever pays to alter a general mechanism to correct a particular bug.

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
Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

Marvin Minsky