Marvin Minsky: Quotes about thinking

Marvin Minsky was American cognitive scientist. Explore interesting quotes on thinking.
Marvin Minsky: 130   quotes 59   likes

“I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience… How would they know?”

Marvin Minsky

Mat Buckland, AI Techniques for Game Programming (2002), Cincinnati, OH: Premier Press, 36 ISBN 1-931841-08-X.
Attributed

People , Understanding , Thinking

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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