72 quotes
When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
The way the mathematics game is played, most variations lie outside the rules, while music can insist on perfect canon or tolerate a casual accompaniment.
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
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.
The Emotion Machine (2006)
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.
Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)
We usually say that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things?
K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)
Only the surface of reason is rational. I don't mean that understanding emotion is easy, only that understanding reason is probably harder.
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
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.
K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)
When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems.
Marvin Minsky in: David G. Stork (1998)
Each subsociety of mind must have its own internal epistemology and phenomenology, with most details private, not only from the central processes, but from one another.
K-Linesː A Theory of Memory (1980)
In particular to perform integration — you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on
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."
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
Perceptrons have been widely publicized as “pattern recognition” or “learning” machines and as such have been discussed in a large number of books, journal articles, and voluminous “reports.” Most of this writing...is without scientific value.
Perceptrons (1988)
Self-awareness is a complex, but carefully constructed illusion: we rightly place high value on the work of those mental agencies that appear able to reflect on the behavior of other agencies—especially our linguistic and ego-structure mechanisms.
Good theories of the mind must span at least three different scales of time: slow, for the billions of years in which our brains have survivied; fast, for the fleeting weeks and months of childhood; and in between, the centuries of growth of our ideas through history.
The Society of Mind (1988)
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.
The Society of Mind (1987)
Perhaps the music that some call 'background' music can tranquilize by turning under-thoughts from bad to neutral, leaving the surface thoughts free of affect by diverting the unconscious.
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
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.
This is a tricky domain because, unlike simple arithmetic, to solve a calculus problem - and in particular to perform integration - you have to be smart about which integration technique should be used: integration by partial fractions, integration by parts, and so on.
Questioning one's own "top-level" goals always reveals the paradox-oscillation of ultimate purpose. How could one decide that a goal is worthwhile — unless one already knew what it is that is worthwhile?
Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)
Music makes things in our minds, but afterward most of them fade away. What remains? ...perhaps what we learn is not the music itself but a way of hearing it.