Geniuses -

genius marvin minsky

Marvin Minsky

General fiction is pretty much about ways that people get into problems and screw their lives up. Science fiction is about everything else.

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genius marvin minsky

But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes, the harsh orders, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame—each and all of these things I had to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualizing of the soul.

genius marvin minsky

In any case, I hope that it will be a good thing when we understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we'll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don't—and bit by bit we'll rebuild ourselves. I don't think that most people will bother with this, because they like themselves just as they are. Perhaps they are not selfish enough, or imaginative, or ambitious. Myself, I don't much like how people are now. We're too shallow, slow, and ignorant. I hope that our future will lead us to ideas that we can use to improve ourselves.

genius marvin minsky

But there’s a big difference between “impossible” and “hard to imagine.” The first is about it; the second is about you!

genius marvin minsky

A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying ﬁrst a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren’t ﬂexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.

genius marvin minsky

You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way.