Marvin Minsky: Use

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

“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

“Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.”

Marvin Minsky

Life Magazine (20 November 1970), p. 68

Suffering

“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 book Society of Mind

Source: The Society of Mind (1987), p. 308

Intelligence , Perfection

“Looking back in vision is like recapitulation in music; both give us time, at certain points, to reconfirm or change our conceptions of the whole.”

Marvin Minsky

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
Context: How do both music and vision build things in our minds? Eye motions show us real objects; phrases show us musical objects. We "learn" a room with bodily motions; large musical sections show us musical "places." Walks and climbs move us from room to room; so do transitions between musical sections. Looking back in vision is like recapitulation in music; both give us time, at certain points, to reconfirm or change our conceptions of the whole.

Music , Change , Time

“No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.”

Marvin Minsky

"Communication with Alien Intelligence" http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/AlienIntelligence.html, in Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence (1985) edited by Edward Regis <!-- Cambridge University Press --> also published in Byte Magazine (April 1985)
Context: Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

Bird , Personality , Flying

“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 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)

“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