Marvin Minsky quotes - page 3

For avoiding nonsense in general, we might accumulate millions of censors. For all we know, this "negative meta-knowledge" - about patterns of thought and inference that have been found defective or harmful - may be a large portion of all we know. (Marvin Minsky)
Positive general principles need always to be supplemented by negative, anecdotal censors. For, it hardly ever pays to alter a general mechanism to correct a particular bug. View quote
Marvin Minsky
We usually say that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things? View quote
Marvin Minsky
No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution. View quote
Marvin Minsky
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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
One's present personality cannot share all the thoughts of one's older personalities - and yet it has some sense that they exist. This is one reason why we feel that we possess an inner Self - a sort of ever-present person-friend, inside the mind, whom we can always ask for help. View quote
Marvin Minsky
In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most mysterious. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Minds are simply what brains do. View quote
Marvin Minsky
All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials. (Marvin Minsky)
The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. View quote
Marvin Minsky
The basic idea in case-based, or CBR, is that the program has stored problems and solutions. Then, when a new problem comes up, the program tries to find a similar problem in its database by finding analogous aspects between the problems. View quote
Marvin Minsky
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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler! View quote
Marvin Minsky
Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired. View quote
Marvin Minsky
The "laws of thought" depend not only on the property of brain cells, but also on how they are connected. View quote
Marvin Minsky
All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different - like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies - along with the knowledge of how to apply them - are among our most powerful tools of thought. View quote
Marvin Minsky
When you "get an idea," or "solve a problem," or have a "memorable experience," you create what we shall call a K-line. View quote
Marvin Minsky
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. View quote
Marvin Minsky
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)
A memory should induce a state through which we see current reality as an instance of the remembered event - or equivalently, see the past as an instance of the present. View quote
Marvin Minsky
Just knowing that such states exist, that is, having symbols for them, is half the battle. View quote
Marvin Minsky
We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres. View quote
Marvin Minsky
In today's computer science curricula ... almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design" View quote
Marvin Minsky