Jim's Davis site has the paper, along with the longer technical paper:
http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/papers/EverNew.pdf
http://cse.ucdavis.edu/~cmg/compmech/pubs/EverNewTitlePage.htm
-- Owen
On Oct 29, 2009, at 11:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
All,
Over the years I can remember many animated conversations among
psychologists about whether it is possible to see something new,
since there is no way for the cognitive machinery to recognize
something for which it does not already have a template. Often
cited in those discussions was the reported experience of people who
had congenital cateracts removed and could not, for a time, see
anything.
the answer to this cocktail party conundrum has always seemed to me
an emphatic YES and NO. No we cannot see anything entirely new,
however nothing that we encounter is ever entirely new. so, for
instance, let it be the case that you had never heard of unicorns,
never seen an illustration of a unicorn, etc, and a unicorn were to
trot into the St. Johns Cafe tomorrow. Would you see it? Well, if
you knew about horses and narwhales, I would say yes, because while
you would not immediately see a unicorn you would see a horse with a
narwale tusk in the middle of its forehead.
Now, it seems to me that Crutchfield's essay (in the Emergence book,
for those of you who have it) is asking the scientific version of
that question.
Do we actually ever discover anything new. His explicit answer, in
the last paragraph of the essay, would seem to be "yes", but the
argument seems in many places to lead in the oppsite direction.
Discovery, he seems to argue, consists of shifting from one form of
computation to another where forms of computation are defined by a
short list of machine-types.
Has anybody out there read the article and have an opinion on this
matter?
Popper's falsificationism would seem to imply that scientists never
DISCOVER anything new; they IMAGINE new things, and then, having
imagined them, find them. Bold Conjectures, he called it. Seems
to go along with Kubie's idea of the preconscious as a place where
pieces of experience get scrambled into new combinations.
Nick
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