List of Marvin Minsky Quotes

I Believed In Realism, As Summarized By John Mccarthy's Comment To The Effect That If We Worked Really Hard, We'd Have An Intelligent System In From Four To Four Hundred Years.

By The Way, It Was His Simulations That Helped Out In Jurassic Park - Without Them, There Would Have Been Only A Few Dinosaurs. Based On His Techniques, Industrial Light And Magic Could Make Whole Herds Of Dinosaurs Race Across The Screen.

But Just As Astronomy Succeeded Astrology, Following Kepler's Discovery Of Planetary Regularities, The Discoveries Of These Many Principles In Empirical Explorations Of Intellectual Processes In Machines Should Lead To A Science, Eventually.

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.

We Turn To Quantities When We Can't Compare The Qualities Of Things.

To Say That The Universe Exists Is Silly, Because It Says That The Universe Is One Of The Things In The Universe. So There's Something Wrong With Questions Like, "what Caused The Universe To Exist?"

If We Understood Something Just One Way, We Would Not Understand It At All.

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.

Each Part Of The Mind Sees Only A Little Of What Happens In Some Others, And That Little Is Swiftly Refined, Reformulated And "represented." We Like To Believe That These Fragments Have Meanings In Themselves - Apart From The Great Webs Of Structure From Which They Emerge - And Indeed This Illusion Is Valuable To Us Qua Thinkers - But Not To Us As Psychologists - Because It Leads Us To Think That Expressible Knowledge Is The First Thing To Study.

A Couple Of Hundred Years From Now, Maybe [science Fiction Writers] Isaac Asimov And Fred Pohl Will Be Considered The Important Philosophers Of The Twentieth Century, And The Professional Philosophers Will Almost All Be Forgotten, Because They're Just Shallow And Wrong, And Their Ideas Aren't Very Powerful.

What Would A Martian Visitor Think To See A Human Being Laugh? It Must Look Truly Horrible: The Sight Of Furious Gestures, Flailing Limbs, And Thorax Heaving In Frenzied Contortions.

The Nature Of Mind: Much Of Its Power Seems To Stem From Just The Messy Ways Its Agents Cross-connect. ...it's Only What We Must Expect From Evolution's Countless Tricks.