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Marvin Minsky - New philosophy and the historians of thought (101/151)

3,840 views · Published 31 October 2016 · 1:33 · Indexed 23 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2016 · Science & Technology

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To hear more of Marvin Minsky’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB2SsvcECzI&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFxJatFYBb7P4NZscvJw1f0r

The scientist, Marvin Minsky (1927-2016) was one of the pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence, having founded the MIT AI Lab in 1970. Since the 1950s, his work involved trying to uncover human thinking processes and replicate them in machines. [Listener: Christopher Sykes; date recorded: 2011]

TRANSCRIPT: I think of it as sort of very important, but in almost the opposite way, which was that philosophy... There’s two aspects of philosophy. There’s... there's the current new philosophy and then there’s the... the philosophers who are really historians of thought and so forth. And it seems to me that the first kind who were just wondering how things work are... they’re what produces the sciences. And as soon as you have a Galileo, then the philosophers who tried... then the Aristotles who tried to understand the world in... they tried to understand the world in terms of the concepts already there, maybe. And then, when they hit a stone wall and things don’t change, it might be a hundred years and then somebody appears who later we call a scientist who says, oh maybe there’s this and that. So, I... I see philos... I think maybe we’re talking about the philosophers on the scene trying to do something and the philosophers who are employed to teach people the old stuff. And of course they're both... they go... they both have the same name.

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