Marvin Minsky Quotes

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

Einstein said, if everything exists as a substance of qualities, and qualities exist only in mind, then all is mind.

The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.

Intellectualism' is the belief that our mind comes upon a world complete in itself, and has the duty of ascertaining its contents; but has no power of re-determining its character, for that is already given.

The psychologists and the metaphysicians wrangle endlessly over the nature of the thinking process in man, but no matter how violently they differ otherwise they all agree that it has little to do with logic and is not much conditioned by overt facts.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

A train of thought is never false. The falsehood lies deep in the necessities of existence.

I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads.

All our knowledge begins with the senses, proceeds then to the understanding, and ends with reason. There is nothing higher than reason.

Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental.

I think, therefore I am.

What we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever changing data of the senses.

Logic pervades the world; the limits of the world are also the limits of logic.

An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession, and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction, that no man, one should think, whose judgement is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit of it.

Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.

The object of knowledge is what exists and its function to know about reality.

The only roads of enquiry there are to think of: one, that it is and that it is not possible for it not to be, this is the path of persuasion (for truth is its companion); the other, that it is not and that it must not be - this I say to you is a path wholly unknowable.

Sensations are nothing but confused modes of thinking.

Thinking... is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colours and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas

The only laws of matter are those that our minds must fabricate and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

We may well ask, What causes induce us to believe in the existence of body? but 'tis vain to ask. Whether there be body or not? That is a point which we must take for granted in all our reasonings.

I don't think the world objectively exists the way we think it exists. There's a constant sort of storytelling process.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.

I love the world, because I love the mind that created the world.