Marvin Minsky Knowledge Quotations

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

Listening to music engages the previously acquired personal knowledge of the listener.

If we understood something just one way, we would not understand it at all.

Logic doesn't apply to the real world.

It makes no sense to seek a single best way to represent knowledge-because each particular form of expression also brings its particular limitations. For example, logic-based systems are very precise, but they make it hard to do reasoning with analogies. Similarly, statistical systems are useful for making predictions, but do not serve well to represent the reasons why those predictions are sometimes correct.

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.