Marvin Minsky Quotes

Anyway, there is a lot of really interesting work going on in the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, and I would love to see philosophers become more closely involved with this.

Consciousness is the smallest player in the operations of the brain.

To know the brain...is equivalent to ascertaining the material course of thought and will, to discovering the intimate history of life in its perpetual duel with external forces.

The brain is a mystery; it has been and still will be. How does the brain produce thoughts? That is the central question and we have still no answer to it.

The brain happens to be a meat machine.

One day we shall certainly 'reduce' thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motions in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?

the brain, the mind, and all the things that happen inside it, it's a very erogenous zone.

The brain, is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe.

Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

When you understand how the mind-brain functions together, you know that faith, which is believing before seeing, is the natural process of creation.

Brain: an apparatus with which we think that we think. Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain.

Actually, I think my view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

What does it mean, exactly, for a given system to be a 'neural correlate of consciousness'?

Lofty questions about the mind are fascinating to ask, philosophers have been asking them for three millennia both in India where I am from and here in the West - but it is only in the brain that we can eventually hope to find the answers.

No matter how closely you examine the water, glucose, and electrolyte salts in the human brain, you can't find the point where these molecules became conscious.

The brain is an immensely complex organ, and many mysteries remain. Exactly how brain and mind or soma and psyche are related is one of them.

I became really interested in the study of consciousness.

The brain runs its show incognito.

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

We are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain; our bodies are hanging along for the ride.

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past.

Sometimes people feel mind is merely the - in some animal, the energy or something from the brain. Now there are little sort of curiosities or I think doubt sometimes a sheer sort of mental attitude, some change in our brain. So these fields, now scientists are showing some interest.

It is impossible to live without brains, either one's own or borrowed.

As followers of natural science we know nothing of any relation between thoughts and the brain, except as a gross correlation in time and space.