Marvin Minsky: Mind

“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.”

Marvin Minsky book Society of Mind

Source: The Society of Mind (1987), Ch.2
Context: 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.

Life , Art , Question

“If there's something you like very much then you should regard this not as you feeling good but as a kind of brain cancer, because it means that some small part of your mind has figured out how to turn off all the other things.”

Marvin Minsky

In "The Many Minds of Marvin Minsky (R.I.P.)" by John Horgan, Scientific American Blogs, 26 January 2016 http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-many-minds-of-marvin-minsky-r-i-p/

Feeling , Parting

“An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.”

Marvin Minsky

TED talk (February 2003) http://blog.ted.com/2008/09/health_populati.php

“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

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

“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 book Society of Mind

Source: The Society of Mind (1987), Ch.1

Feeling

“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

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Music , Way

“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 book Society of Mind

Prologue
The Society of Mind (1987)

Books , Idea , Sense

“If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler!”

Marvin Minsky

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
Context: If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler! The theory of the roots of equations seemed hard for centuries within its little world of real numbers, but it suddenly seemed simple once Gauss exposed the larger world of so-called complex numbers. Similarly, music should make more sense once seen through listeners' minds.

Problem

“It's harmful, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close.”

Marvin Minsky book Society of Mind

Source: The Society of Mind (1987), Ch.2
Context: 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.

Thinking

“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

“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)