Marvin Minsky: Trending quotes (page 3)

Marvin Minsky trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection
Marvin Minsky: 130   quotes 59   likes

“Concrete concepts are not necessarily the simplest ones.”

Marvin Minsky

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)
Context: 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.

“For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles — with virtually no success.”

Marvin Minsky book Society of Mind

Source: The Society of Mind (1987), p. 187
Context: 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.

Success

“Our culture has a universal myth in which we see emotion as more complex and obscure than intellect. Indeed, emotion might be "deeper" in some sense of prior evolution, but this need not make it harder to understand; in fact, I think today we actually know much more about emotion than about reason.”

Marvin Minsky

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Understanding , Thinking , Sense , Universe

“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

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Truth , Mathematics , Thinking , Envy

“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”

Marvin Minsky

useful ways to combine different fragments of knowledge.
K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Way , Knowledge , Thinking

“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

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Way , Problem

“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 book The Emotion Machine

The Emotion Machine (2006)

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

Marvin Minsky

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Question

“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

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Intelligence , Idea , Thinking , Learning

“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 book The Emotion Machine

The Emotion Machine (2006)

Way , Thinking

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

Marvin Minsky

Turing Award Lecture "Form and Content in Computer Science" (1969), in Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 17 (2) (April 1970)

Future

“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 book Society of Mind

The Society of Mind (1987)

Personality

“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

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

“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 book The Emotion Machine

The Emotion Machine (2006)

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

Marvin Minsky book Society of Mind

Prologue
The Society of Mind (1987)

Parting

“Music… immerses us in seemingly stable worlds! How can this be, when there is so little of it present at each moment?”

Marvin Minsky

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

World , Music

“Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves — apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge — and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers — but not to us as psychologists — because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study.”

Marvin Minsky

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Knowledge , Thinking , Study , Parting

“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 book Society of Mind

The Society of Mind (1987)

Feeling , Sense , Help , Personality

“When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.”

Marvin Minsky

Marvin Minsky in: David G. Stork (1998). HAL's Legacy: 2001's Computer As Dream and Reality. p. 16

Knowledge , Problem

“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 book The Emotion Machine

The Emotion Machine (2006)

Children , Education , Faith , Way