Quote

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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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
Always
Almost
Things
Secret
Wrong
Means
Scarcely
Anything
Connected
Real
Seek
Mean
Meaning
Thing
Depends

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing but most of the time, we aren't either.
Marvin Minsky
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In general, we’re least aware of what our minds do best.
Marvin Minsky
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Societies need rules that make no sense for individuals. For example, it makes no difference whether a single car drives on the left or on the right. But it makes all the difference when there are many cars!
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Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.
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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Eventually, robots will make everything.
Marvin Minsky
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If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.
Marvin Minsky
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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
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One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.
Marvin Minsky
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I bet the human brain is a kludge
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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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