Marvin Minsky Quotes
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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.
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Concrete concepts are not necessarily the simplest ones. A novice best remembers 'being at' a concert. The amateur remembers more of what it 'sounded like.' Only the professional remembers the music itself, timbres, tones and textures.
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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.
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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.
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Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.
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Hearing music is like viewing scenery and... when we hear good music our minds react in very much the same way they do when we see things.
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I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn't know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise.
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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.
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An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
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For avoiding nonsense in general, we might accumulate millions of censors. For all we know, this 'negative meta-knowledge' - about patterns of thought and inference that have been found defective or harmful - may be a large portion of all we know.
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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.'
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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?
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How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
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We find things that do not fit into familiar frameworks hard to understand – such things seem meaningless.