Marvin Minsky: Thing

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

“A thing or idea seems meaningful only when we have several different ways to represent it — different perspectives and different associations.”

Marvin Minsky

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
Context: What is the difference between merely knowing (or remembering, or memorizing) and understanding?... A thing or idea seems meaningful only when we have several different ways to represent it — different perspectives and different associations.... Then we can turn it around in our minds, so to speak: however it seems at the moment, we can see it another way and we never come to a full stop. In other words, we can 'think' about it. If there were only one way to represent this thing or idea, we would not call this representation thinking.

Way , Idea

“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

“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

“Our eyes are always flashing sudden flicks of different pictures to our brains, yet none of that saccadic action leads to any sense of change or motion in the world; each thing reposes calmly in its "place!"”

Marvin Minsky

...What makes us such innate Copernicans?
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

World , Sense , Change

“We find things that do not fit into familiar frameworks hard to understand – such things seem meaningless.”

Marvin Minsky

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Understanding

“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

“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 usually say that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things?”

Marvin Minsky

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Feeling , Understanding