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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
Questions
Exist
Says
Wrong
Universe
Caused
Something
Silly
Things
Like
Exists

More quotes by Marvin Minsky

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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.
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An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.
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In science, one learns the most by studying what seems to be the least.
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Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.
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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.
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Will robots inherit the earth? Yes, but they will be our children.
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Eventually, robots will make everything.
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If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
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We turn to quantities when we can't compare the qualities of things.
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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
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I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience... How would they know?
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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.
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General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
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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
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I bet the human brain is a kludge
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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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
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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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There was a failure to recognize the deep problems in AI for instance, those captured in Blocks World. The people building physical robots learned nothing.
Marvin Minsky
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Everything is similar if you're willing to look far out of focus.
Marvin Minsky