Marvin Minsky Quotes

1927–2016 United States

Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 - January 24, 2016) was an American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory, author of several texts on AI and philosophy, and winner of the 1969 Turing Award.

United States
Computer scientists

Random Marvin Minsky quote

72 quotes

The old distinctions among emotion, reason, and aesthetics are like the earth, air, and fire of an ancient alchemy. We will need much better concepts than these for a working psychic chemistry.

If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler!

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

The moral was that one simply cannot learn enough by studying learning by itself; one also has to understand the nature of what one wants to learn.

Perceptrons (1988)

Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.

Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men

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.

The Society of Mind (1987)

Each agent needs to know which of its servants can do what, but as to how, that information has no place or use inside those tiny minds inside our minds.

The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ... It's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.

The Society of Mind (1988)

We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres.

Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)

Just knowing that such states exist, that is, having symbols for them, is half the battle.

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

When you "get an idea," or "solve a problem," or have a "memorable experience," you create what we shall call a K-line.

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

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

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Get the mind into the (partial) state that solved the old problem; then it might handle the new problem in the "same way."

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.

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, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

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

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Most adults have some childlike fascination for making and arranging larger structures out of smaller ones.

Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)

Most of our future attempts to build large, growing Artificial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders.

The Emotion Machine (2006)

Changing the states of many agents grossly alters behavior, while changing only a few just perturbs the overall disposition a little.

K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Marvin Minsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.