Marvin Minsky Quotes
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In general we are least aware of what our minds do best.
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We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.
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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.
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Our eyes are always flashing sudden flicks of different pictures to our brains, yet none of that saccadic action leads to any sense of change or motion in the world; each thing reposes calmly in its 'place'! ...What makes us such innate Copernicans?
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Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers.
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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.
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Get the mind into the (partial) state that solved the old problem; then it might handle the new problem in the 'same way.'
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Only the surface of reason is rational. I don't mean that understanding emotion is easy, only that understanding reason is probably harder.
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I suspect our human 'thinking processes' often 'break down,' but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced.
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We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake - like putting a fork in one's eye or using a window instead of a door.
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Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
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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.
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If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do.
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I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning.
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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.
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You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.
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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.
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Music... immerses us in seemingly stable worlds! How can this be, when there is so little of it present at each moment?
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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.
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We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as was being explored by Patrick Winston.
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Stanley Kubrick knew we had good graphics around MIT and came to my lab to find out how to do it. We had some really good stuff. I was very impressed with Kubrick; he knew all the graphics work I had ever heard of, and probably more.
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It would seem that making unusual connections is unusually difficult and, often, rather 'indirect'-be it via words, images, or whatever. The bizarre structures used by mnemonist (and, presumably unknowingly, by each of us) suggests that arbitrary connections require devious pathways.
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We usually say that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things?
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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.