“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.

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American cognitive scientist 1927–2016

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