Quote

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Marvin Minsky

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Marvin Minsky
Age: 88 †
Born: 1927
Born: August 9
Died: 2016
Died: January 24
Artificial Intelligence Researcher
Computer Scientist
Mathematician
Scientist
University Teacher
New York City
New York
Marvin Lee Minsky
Marvin L. Minsky
Making
Principal
Brains
Activities
Changes
Activity
Brain

More quotes by Marvin Minsky

Image
In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.
Marvin Minsky
Image
I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?
Marvin Minsky
Image
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?
Marvin Minsky
Image
One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky
Image
What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.
Marvin Minsky
Image
But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.
Marvin Minsky
Image
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.
Marvin Minsky
Image
Common sense is not a simple thing. Instead, it is an immense society of hard-earned practical ideas - of multitudes of life-learned rules and exceptions, dispositions and tendencies, balances and checks.
Marvin Minsky
Image
How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them.
Marvin Minsky
Image
Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might decide to keep us as pets.
Marvin Minsky
Image
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.
Marvin Minsky
Image
All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials.
Marvin Minsky
Image
The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know. That's why it's almost always wrong to seek the real meaning of anything. A thing with just one meaning has scarcely any meaning at all.
Marvin Minsky
Image
An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
Marvin Minsky
Image
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.
Marvin Minsky
Image
Our present culture may be largely shaped by this strange idea of isolating children's thought from adult thought. Perhaps the way our culture educates its children better explains why most of us come out as dumb as they do, than it explains how some of us come out as smart as they do.
Marvin Minsky
Image
Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most mysterious.
Marvin Minsky
Image
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.
Marvin Minsky
Image
In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
Marvin Minsky
Image
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.
Marvin Minsky