Paul Churchland vs. Marvin Minsky
Side-by-side comparison of two thinkers
Paul Churchland
1942 – present
Paul Montgomery Churchland is a Canadian philosopher known for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. After earning a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh under Wilfrid Sellars (1969), Churchland rose to the rank of full professor at the University of Manitoba before accepting the Valtz Family Endowed Chair in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and joint appointments in that institution's Institute for Neural Computation and on its Cognitive Science Faculty.
"The curiosity of Man, and the cunning of his reason, have revealed much of what Nature held hidden."
Marvin Minsky
1927 – 2016
Marvin Minsky was a Harvard- and Princeton-trained American mathematician who used his training as a foundation for research in cognitive and computer science aspects of artificial intelligence (AI). After three years as a Junior Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, Minsky joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1958 and spent the rest of his career at that institution. There, he co-founded MIT's AI laboratory, among other initiatives, and wrote extensively about AI and philosophy.
"All intelligent persons also possess some larger-scale frame-systems whose members seemed at first impossibly different — like water with electricity, or poetry…"
Connections
Both wrote about: