- Michael Joyce quoting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari "The Desiring-Machines", Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 1987, in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, The University of Michigan Press, Michael Joyce, 1995
If you understand something in only one way, then you do not really understand it at all. This is because if something goes wrong you get stuck with a thought that just sits in your mind with nowhere to go. The secret of what anything means to us depends on how we have connected it to all the other things we know. This is why, when someone learns "by rote," we say that they do not really understand. However, if you have several different representations, when one approach fails you can try another. Of course, making too many indiscriminate connections will turn a mind to mush. But well-connected representations let you turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives, until you find one that works for you. And that is what we mean by thinking!
- Marvin Minsky quoting from his book, The Society of Mind, in "Will Robots Inherit the Earth?", an article he wrote for Scientific American, Life in the Universe, Special Issue, October 1994
"the human mind...operates by association...in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain"
- Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think," Atlantic Monthly 176 (1945) quoted in Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics, The University of Michigan Press, Michael Joyce, 1995