We'll show you that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
You don't understand anything unless you understand there are at least 3 ways. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect. ...it's only what… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
An ethicist is someone who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
Anyone could learn Lisp in one day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take three days. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
How many processes are going on, to keep that teacup level in your grasp? There must be a hundred of them. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
Once the computers got control, we might never get it back. We would survive at their sufferance. If we're lucky, they might… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share 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… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
We wanted to solve robot problems and needed some vision, action, reasoning, planning, and so forth. We even used some structural learning, such as… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
We rarely recognize how wonderful it is that a person can traverse an entire lifetime without making a single really serious mistake — like… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
Each practitioner thinks there's one magic way to get a machine to be smart, and so they're all wasting their time in a sense.… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share 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… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
All intelligent problem solvers are subject to the same ultimate constraints - limitations on space, time, and materials. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
“But there’s a big difference between “impossible” and “hard to imagine.” The first is about it; the second is about you!” — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does what it is works but what it does when it's stuck. — Marvin Minsky Copy Share 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… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image
Everything, including that which happens in our brains, depends on these and only on these: A set of fixed, deterministic laws. A purely random… — Marvin Minsky Copy Share Image