Marvin Minsky Quotes

The real question is not whether machines think but whether men do. The mystery which surrounds a thinking machine already surrounds a thinking man.

Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of.

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

I wish the children could be taught early on that our thinking creates our experience.

Our unconscious is not more animal than our conscious, it is often even more human.

We actually form the world at every instant, although we're not cognitively aware of that but - and there are people would argue with that to some degree.

People are powerfully moved by imagination, belief, and knowledge. They can consider the past and future. They can make changes in their behavior out of reason in a way that animals can't do.

Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

I'm quite interested in my own mental processes, simply because I'm a failed scientist, and because I'm interested in how the brain and the mind works, and I like to avoid easy descriptions.

I was absolutely blown away when I first talked to Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan at how ambitious they wanted 'Westworld' to be in looking at the drives that are leading human beings over the cliff of existence.

Look, when AIs come up, they're not going to be like us. A self-aware, sentient AI is not going to be like a human.

I'm not a machine.

Since the beginning of the computer age, there has been immense development in computer intelligence but exactly zero development in computer consciousness.

The human race is ill because we have no contact with the lowest level of consciousness.

Just as a man working with his tools should know its limitations, a man working with his cognitive apparatus must know its limitations.

To understand our own thinking is to understand all thinking.

While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution – so one theory goes – this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us … we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see … Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

Even those of us who are very very aware are still so unaware. Everything's relative so that, the more you know, the more you know you don't know anything.

We could say that practically all the problems of the human race are due to the fact that thought is not proprioceptive.

it is in our minds that we live much of our life.

In theory, there is nothing the computer can do that the human mind can not do. The computer merely takes a finite amount of data and performs a finite number of operations upon them. The human mind can duplicate the process

The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God.

If you knew the immensity of what it means to be human, you would not talk about God or Heaven.