Marvin Minsky on Consciousness

“Some form of self-awareness is surely essential to highly intelligent thought... On the other hand, I doubt that any part of a mind can see very deeply into other parts; it can only use models it constructs of them.”

“Consciousness is a suitcase-like word that we use to refer to many different mental activities, which don't have a single cause or origin—and, surely, that is why people have found it so hard to "understand what consciousness is." …this produced a problem that will remain unsolvable until we find ways to chop it up. ...we can replace that single, big problem by many smaller, more solvable ones.”