Skip to content

Quotes from Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious — Marvin Minsky

1927–2016 United States

← All quotes by Marvin Minsky

5 quotes

I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning.

Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)

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)

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)

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)

Since we have no systematic way to avoid all the inconsistencies of commonsense logic, each person must find his own way by building a private collection of "cognitive censors" to suppress the kinds of mistakes he has discovered in the past.

Jokes and their Relation to the Cognitive Unconscious (1980)

Attribution

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