Marvin Minsky - The Society of Mind (1988)

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

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

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

Marvin Minsky
Questions about arts, traits, and styles of life are actually quite technical. They ask us to explain what happens among the agents of our minds. But this is a subject about which we have never learned very much... Such questions will be answered in time. But it will just prolong the wait if we keep using pseudo-explanation words like "holistic" and "gestalt." …It's harmful, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close.

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
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
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
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