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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

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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
Wrong
Universe
Something
Caused
Things
Silly
Like
Exists
Questions
Exist
Says

More quotes by Marvin Minsky

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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
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The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.
Marvin Minsky
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It would be as useless to perceive how things 'actually look' as it would be to watch the random dots on untuned television screens.
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It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute.
Marvin Minsky
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I bet the human brain is a kludge
Marvin Minsky
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Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.
Marvin Minsky
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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
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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.
Marvin Minsky
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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
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Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws.
Marvin Minsky
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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.
Marvin Minsky
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Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days.
Marvin Minsky
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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.
Marvin Minsky
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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
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An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
Marvin Minsky
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In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
Marvin Minsky
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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky
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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
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In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.
Marvin Minsky
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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.
Marvin Minsky