Marvin Minsky Quotes

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.

But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it works but what it does when it’s stuck. —MARVIN MINSKY

In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.

But there’s a big difference between “impossible” and “hard to imagine.” The first is about it; the second is about you!

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

Papert's Principle: Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows.

Each of our major Ways to Think results from turning certain resources on while turning certain others off—and thus changing some ways that our brains behave.

The artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once defined free will as “internal forces I do not understand.”26 People intuitively believe in free will, not just because we have this terrible human need for agency but also because most people know next to nothing about those internal forces. And even the neuroscientist on the witness stand can’t accurately predict which individual with extensive frontal damage will become the serial murderer, because science as a whole still knows about only a handful of those internal forces. Shattered bone → inflammation → constricted movement is easy. Neurotransmitters + hormones + childhood + ____ + ____ + isn’t.

¿Acaso los robots heredarán la Tierra? Sí, pero serán nuestros hijos. MARVIN MINSKY

In 1970, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky said, “In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.

1956 conference at Dartmouth organized by John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky, where the field of artificial intelligence was launched.

If you understand something in only one way, then you don’t really understand it at all. This is because, if something goes wrong, you get stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we’ve connected it to all the other things we know. This is why, when someone learns “by rote,” we say that they don’t really understand. However, if you have several different representations then, when one approach fails you can try another. Of course, making too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you. And that’s what we mean by thinking! —MARVIN MINSKY213

In any case, I hope that it will be a good thing when we understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't—and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves. I don't think that most people will bother with this, because they like themselves just as they are. Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves.

The art of a great painting is not in any one idea, nor in a multitude of separate tricks for placing all those pigment spots, but in the great network of relationships among its parts. Similarly, the agents, raw, that make our minds are by themselves as valueless as aimless, scattered daubs of paint. What counts is what we make of them.

We shouldn't let our envy of distinguished masters of the arts distract us from the wonder of how each of us gets new ideas. Perhaps we hold on to our superstitions about creativity in order to make our own deficiencies seem more excusable. For when we tell ourselves that masterful abilities are simply unexplainable, we're also comforting ourselves by saying that those superheroes come endowed with all the qualities we don't possess. Our failures are therefore no fault of our own, nor are those heroes' virtues to their credit, either. If it isn't learned, it isn't earned. When we actually meet the heroes whom our culture views as great, we don't find any singular propensities––only combinations of ingredients quite common in themselves. Most of these heroes are intensely motivated, but so are many other people. They're usually very proficient in some field--but in itself we simply call this craftmanship or expertise. They often have enough self-confidence to stand up to the scorn of peers--but in itself, we might just call that stubbornness. They surely think of things in some novel ways, but so does everyone from time to time. And as for what we call "intelligence", my view is that each person who can speak coherently already has the better part of what our heroes have. Then what makes genius appear to stand apart, if we each have most of what it takes? I suspect that genius needs one thing more: in order to accumulate outstanding qualities, one needs unusually effective ways to learn. It's not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of "higher-order" expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius. Why do certain people learn so many more and better skills? These all-important differences could begin with early accidents. One child works out clever ways to arrange some blocks in rows and stacks; a second child plays at rearranging how it thinks. Everyone can praise the first child's castles and towers, but no one can see what the second child has done, and one may even get the false impression of a lack of industry. But if the second child persists in seeking better ways to learn, this can lead to silent growth in which some better ways to learn may lead to better ways to learn to learn. Then, later, we'll observe an awesome, qualitative change, with no apparent cause--and give to it some empty name like talent, aptitude, or gift.

But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes, the harsh orders, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all of these things I had to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul.

The Concept of a “Panalogy” Douglas Lenat 1998: “If you pluck an isolated sentence from a book, it will likely lose some or all of its meaning—i.e., if you show it out of context to someone else, they will likely miss some or all of its intended significance. Thus, much of the meaning of a represented piece of information derives from the context in which the information is encoded and decoded. This can be a tremendous advantage. To the extent that the two thinking beings are sharing a common rich context, they may utilize terse signals to communicate complex thoughts.

The intellect can also use emotions not to fight emotions but to arouse them. Artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, for example, describes a situation in which he is having trouble concentrating on his research. In order to stay focused, he imagines that a competing researcher is on the verge of solving the problem Minsky is trying to solve. The trick works: Minsky stays focused even though he knows, intellectually, that the other researcher is unlikely to solve the problem, inasmuch as he has never shown the least interest in it.2 Thus, although the intellect cannot command the emotions to commit to one of its projects, it might be able to trick them into committing.

The concept of “I,” as a single, unified whole making all decisions continuously, is an illusion created by our own subconscious minds.    Mentally we feel that our mind is a single entity, continuously and smoothly processing information, totally in charge of our decisions. But the picture emerging from brain scans is quite different from the perception we have of our own mind.    MIT professor Marvin Minsky, one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence, told me that the mind is more like a “society of minds,” with different submodules, each trying to compete with the others.    When I interviewed Steven Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard University, I asked him how consciousness emerges out of this mess. He said that consciousness was like a storm raging in our brain. He elaborated on this when he wrote that “the intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive ‘I’ that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of our muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

MIT scientist Marvin Minsky, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, declared: “The legend of the single Self can only divert us from the target of that inquiry.9 . . . [I]t can make sense to think there exists, inside your brain, a society of different minds. Like members of a family, the different minds can work together to help each other, each still having its own mental experiences that the others never know about.”10

the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky once explained, are simply “machines that happen to be made out of meat.

Evolutionary pressures shaped Homo sapiens to have an average life expectancy of roughly thirty years. The logic is easily understood. “Natural selection favors the genes of those with the most descendants,” explains MIT’s Marvin Minsky. “Those numbers tend to grow exponentially with the number of generations, and so natural selection prefers the genes of those who reproduce at earlier ages.

About three decades ago, in 1993, I had a debate with my own mentor Marvin Minsky. I argued that we needed about 1014 calculations per second to begin to emulate human intelligence. Minsky, for his part, maintained that the amount of computation was not important, and that we could program a Pentium (the processor in a desktop computer from 1993) to be as intelligent as a human.

There is not the slightest reason to doubt that brains are anything other than machines with enormous parts that work in perfect accord with physical laws.

Proponents of strong AI, such as Marvin Minsky, have long thought that consciousness could exist on a silicon platform. Like Ray Kurzweil, he may well be encouraged to download his consciousness to a computer chip no larger than the head of a pin—a perfect fit, as his phrenologist would say.

What is so important about Engelbart’s legacy is that he saw the computer as primarily a tool to augment—not replace—human capability. In our current era, by contrast, much of the financing flowing out of Silicon Valley is aimed at building machines that can replace humans. In a famous encounter in 1953 at MIT, Marvin Minsky, the father of research on artificial intelligence, declared: “We’re going to make machines intelligent. We are going to make them conscious!” To which Doug Engelbart replied: “You’re going to do all that for the machines? What are you going to do for the people?

reasoning can be reduced to arithmetic, which, even in Hobbes’s time, could be performed by mechanism, then is mechanism capable of reasoning? Can machines think? (Or, as Marvin Minsky put it, “Why do people think computers can’t?”)

Marvin Minsky put it, “The mind is what the brain does.

Knowhow is the tacit computational capacity that allows us to perform actions, and it is accumulated at both the individual and collective levels. The tacit nature of knowhow seems strange, as it makes us feel like automatons that are unaware of what we are doing. Yet there is nothing strange in that. As Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, once said: “No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.”4

Asimov was a long-time member and Vice President of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs", but he also stated that the only two people he had ever met who he would admit were more intelligent than himself were Marvin Minsky and Carl Sagan.

You don’t understand anything until you learn it more than one way.” —MARVIN MINSKY

Define your terms … or we shall never understand one another.”10 This admonition from the eighteenth-century philosopher Voltaire is a challenge for anyone talking about artificial intelligence, because its central notion—intelligence—remains so ill-defined. Marvin Minsky himself coined the phrase “suitcase word”11 for terms like intelligence and its many cousins, such as thinking, cognition, consciousness, and emotion. Each is packed like a suitcase with a jumble of different meanings. Artificial intelligence inherits this packing problem, sporting different meanings in different contexts.