Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Marvin Minsky, fully Marvin Lee Minsky

American Cognitive Scientist in the field of Artificial Intelligence, Co-Founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI Laboratory, Author

"A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying ?rst a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren?t ?exible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it."

"A memory should induce a state through which we see current reality as an instance of the remembered event?or equivalently, see the past as an instance of the present. ...the system can perform a computation analogous to one from the memorable past, but sensitive to present goals and circumstances."

"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."

"A related reason why the mind-brain problem seems hard is that we all believe in having a Self - some sort of compact, point-like entity that somehow knows what's happening throughout a vast and complex mind. It seems to us that this entity persists through our lives in spite of change. This feeling manifests itself when we say "I think" rather than "thinking is happening", or when we agree that "I think therefore I am," instead of "I think, therefore I change". Even when we recognize that memories must change our minds, we feel that something else stays fixed - the thing that has those memories. In chapter 4 of The Society of Mind[l] I argue that this sense of having a Self is an elaborately constructed illusion - albeit one of great and practical value. Our brains are endowed with machinery destined to develop persistent self-images and to maintain their coherence in the face of continuous change. But those changes are substantial, too; your adult mind is not very like the one mind you had in infancy. To be sure, you may have changed much since childhood - but if one succeeds, in later life, to manage to avoid much growth, that poses no great mystery."

"An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind."

"Around 1967 Dan Bobrow wrote a program to do algebra problems based on symbols rather than numbers."

"Artificial intelligence and its predecessor, cybernetics, have given us a new view of the world in general and of machines in particular. In previous times, if someone said that a human brain is just a machine, what would that have meant to the average person? It would have seemed to imply that a person must be something like a locomotive or a typewriter. This is because, in earlier days, the word machine was applied only to things that were simple and completely comprehensible. Until the past half century - starting with the work of Kurt Goedel and Alan Turing in the 1930s and of Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts a decade later - we had never conceived of the possible ranges of computational processes. The situation is different today, not only because of those new theories, but also because we now can actually build and use machines that have thousands of millions of parts. This experience has changed our view. It is only partly that artificial intelligence has produced machines that do things that resemble thinking. It is also that we can see that our old ideas about the limitations of machines were not well founded. We have learned much more about how little we know about such matters."

"But there?s a big difference between impossible and hard to imagine. The first is about it; the second is about you!"

"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."

"Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer."

"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."

"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."

"Each sub-society of mind must have its own internal epistemology and phenomenology, with most details private, not only from the central processes, but from one another."

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

"Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us."

"Each part of the mind sees only a little of what happens in some others, and that little is swiftly refined, reformulated and "represented." We like to believe that these fragments have meanings in themselves?apart from the great webs of structure from which they emerge?and indeed this illusion is valuable to us qua thinkers?but not to us as psychologists?because it leads us to think that expressible knowledge is the first thing to study."

"For generations, scientists and philosophers have tried to explain ordinary reasoning in terms of logical principles?with virtually no success. I suspect this enterprise failed because it was looking in the wrong direction: common sense works so well not because it is an approximation of logic; logic is only a small part of our great accumulation of different, useful ways to chain things together."

"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."

"General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else."

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

"How do both music and vision build things in our minds? Eye motions show us real objects; phrases show us musical objects. We "learn" a room with bodily motions; large musical sections show us musical "places." Walks and climbs move us from room to room; so do transitions between musical sections. Looking back in vision is like recapitulation in music; both give us time, at certain points, to reconfirm or change our conceptions of the whole."

"Hearing music is like viewing scenery and... when we hear good music our minds react in very much the same way they do when we see things."

"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."

"How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them."

"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."

"I cannot articulate enough to express my dislike to people who think that understanding spoils your experience? How would they know?"

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

"I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn't know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise."

"I bet the human brain is a kludge."

"I suspect our human "thinking processes" often "break down," but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced."

"I don't mean to say that brains or minds are simple; brains are immensely complex machines-and so are what they do. I merely mean to say that the nature of their relationship is simple. Whenever we speak about a mind, we're referring to the processes that move our brains from state to state. Naturally, we cannot expect to find any compact description to cover every detail of all the processes in a human brain, because that would involve the details of the architectures of perhaps a hundred different sorts of computers, interconnected by thousands of specialized bundles of connections. It is an immensely complex matter of engineering. Nevertheless, when the mind is regarded, in principle, in terms of what the brain may do, many questions that are usually considered to be philosophical can now be recognized as merely psychological-because the long-sought connections between mind and brain do not involve two separate worlds, but merely relate two points of view."

"I think Lenat is headed in the right direction, but someone needs to include a knowledge base about learning."

"If explaining minds seems harder than explaining songs, we should remember that sometimes enlarging problems makes them simpler! The theory of the roots of equations seemed hard for centuries within its little world of real numbers, but it suddenly seemed simple once Gauss exposed the larger world of so-called complex numbers. Similarly, music should make more sense once seen through listeners' minds."

"In general we are least aware of what our minds do best."

"If you just have a single problem to solve, then fine, go ahead and use a neural network. But if you want to do science and understand how to choose architectures, or how to go to a new problem, you have to understand what different architectures can and cannot do."

"Innate sentic detectors could help by teaching children about their own affective states. For if distinct signals arouse specific states, the child can associate those signals with those states. Just knowing that such states exist, that is, having symbols for them, is half the battle."

"In today's computer science curricula... almost all their time is devoted to formal classification of syntactic language types, defeatist unsolvability theories, folklore about systems programming, and generally trivial fragments of "optimization of logic design"?the latter often in situations where the art of heuristic programming has far outreached the special-case "theories" so grimly taught and tested?and invocations about programming style almost sure to be outmoded before the student graduates."

"Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know."

"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."

"It would seem that making unusual connections is unusually difficult and, often, rather "indirect"?be it via words, images, or whatever. The bizarre structures used by mnemonists (and, presumably unknowingly, by each of us) suggests that arbitrary connections require devious pathways."

"Most adults have some childlike fascination for making and arranging larger structures out of smaller ones."

"Most of our future attempts to build large, growing Artificial Intelligences will be subject to all sorts of mental disorders."

"Most theories of learning have been based on ideas of "reinforcement" of success. But all these theories postulate a single, centralized reward mechanism. I doubt this could suffice for human learning because the recognition of which events should be considered memorable cannot be a single, uniform process. It requires too much "intelligence." Instead I think such recognitions must be made, for each division of the mind, by some other agency that has engaged the present one for a purpose."

"Music... immerses us in seemingly stable worlds! How can this be, when there is so little of it present at each moment?"

"No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it's doing; but most of the time, we aren't either."

"Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed!"

"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."

"One reason why the mind-brain problem has always seemed mysterious is that minds seem to us so separate from their physical embodiments. Why do we find it so easy to imagine the same mind being moved to a different body or brain - or even existing by itself? One reason could be that concerns about minds are mainly concerns about changes in states - and these do not often have much to do with the natures of those states themselves. From a functional or procedural viewpoint, we often care only about how each agent changes state in response to the actions upon it of other agents. This is why we so often can discuss the organization of a community without much concern for the physical constitution of its members. It is the same inside a computer; it is only signals representing changes that matter, whereas we have no reason to be concerned with properties that do not change. Consider that it is just those properties of physical objects that change the least - such as their colors, sizes, weights, or shapes - that, naturally, are the easiest to sense. Yet these, precisely because they don't change, are the ones that matter least of all, in computational processes. So naturally minds seem detached from the physical. In regard to mental processes, it matters not what the parts of brains are; it only matters what they do--and what they are connected to."

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

"Of what use is musical knowledge? Here is one idea. Each child spends endless days in curious ways; we call this play. A child stacks and packs all kinds of blocks and boxes, lines them up, and knocks them down. ...Clearly, the child is learning about space! ...how on earth does one learn about time? Can one time fit inside another? Can two of them go side by side? In music, we find out!"