Marvin Minsky Quotes

Changing the states of many agents grossly alters behavior, while changing only a few just perturbs the overall disposition a little.

Get the mind into the (partial) state that solved the old problem; then it might handle the new problem in the "same way."

Old answers never perfectly suit new questions, except in the most formal, logical circumstances.

I maintain that attitudes do really precede propositions, feelings come before facts.

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.

We shall envision the mind (or brain) as composed of many partially autonomous "agents"—as a "Society" of smaller minds. ...It is easiest to think about partial states that constrain only agents within a single Division. ...(we suggest) the local mechanisms for resolving conflicts could be the precursors of what we know later as reasoning — useful ways to combine different fragments of knowledge.

We usually say that one must first understand simpler things. But what if feelings and viewpoints are the simpler things?

When you "get an idea," or "solve a problem," or have a "memorable experience," you create what we shall call a K-line. This K-line gets connected to those "mental agencies" that were actively involved in the memorable event. When that K-line is later "activated," it reactivates some of those mental agencies, creating a "partial mental state" resembling the original.

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.

All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different — like water with electricity, or poetry with music. Yet many such analogies — along with the knowledge of how to apply them — are among our most powerful tools of thought. They explain our ability sometimes to see one thing — or idea — as though it were another, and thus to apply knowledge and experience gathered in one domain to solve problems in another. It is thus that we transfer knowledge via the paradigms of Science. We learn to see gases and fluids as particles, particles as waves, and waves as envelopes of growing spheres.

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.

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?

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.

I am inclined to doubt that anything very resembling formal logic could be a good model for human reasoning. In particular, I doubt that any logic that prohibits self-reference can be adequate for psychology: no mind can have enough power — without the power to think about Thinking itself. Without Self-Reference it would seem immeasurably harder to achieve Self-Consciousness — which, so far as I can see, requires at least some capacity to reflect on what it does. If Russell shattered our hopes for making a completely reliable version of commonsense reasoning, still we can try to find the islands of "local consistency," in which naive reasoning remains correct.

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.