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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.

— Marvin Minsky The Society of Mind (1988)

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Mind

More quotes by Marvin Minsky

It's harmful, when naming leads the mind to think that names alone bring meaning close.

The Society of Mind (1987)

Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.

The "laws of thought" depend not only on the property of brain cells, but also on how they are connected.

The Society of Mind (1987)

There is no reason to suppose that any of these virtues carry over to the many-layered version.

Perceptrons (1988)

Every smart person wants to be corrected, not admired.

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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

H. P. Lovecraft The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.

Kenneth Boulding to Kenneth Boulding in: United States. Congress. House (1973)

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Friedrich Schiller On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794)

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Marvin Minsky (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.