Marvin Minsky

The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we've connected it to all the other things we know.

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

Education needs to be based on debugging, not on instruction.

It's not that AI is so smart; it's that natural intelligence is so stupid.

We'll show that machines can be as smart as people, and then we'll discover that people are smarter than we thought.

A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.

The problem is not whether machines think, but whether men do.

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.

For generations, mathematicians have been trained to respect the 'reductionist' idea that every phenomenon can be explained by breaking it into smaller parts. But this is simply not true.

The most efficient way to solve a problem is to already know how to solve it.

What we call 'consciousness' is, in fact, only a very small part of what goes on in our minds.

We build our minds by making mind-like things, and then we use those things to help us think.

The power of intelligence is derived from the immense number of small, simple, and non-intelligent parts.

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.

The principal activities of brains are making changes in themselves.

Every time you learn something new, you have to reorganize all your old knowledge.

We are not the survival of the fittest. We are the survival of the most teachable.

The biggest challenge for AI is to figure out how to get machines to want things.

Once computers have the power to simulate evolution, they will cease to be computers as we know them.

Music is a way to make thoughts out of feelings and feelings out of thoughts.