Ted,
If I understand Crutchfield arightly, he would not regard Windows 7 as
something "new" since it is written on the same kind of "machine" as XP.
Do I understand him correctly?
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Ted Carmichael
To: [email protected];The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 10/30/2009 11:32:48 AM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Crutchfield 's "Is anything ever new?"
Have you seen all those commercials for Windows 7? Microsoft's "new" operating
system?
It isn't new at all. Just the same old ones and zeros.
-Ted
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 2:15 AM, Russ Abbott <[email protected]> wrote:
This seems to me to be asking a version of the question whether one can ever
think something for which one does not already have a word--i.e., whether one's
language determines and limits one's possible thoughts.
I think that's wrong. A simple argument would be that if it were true then we
would never have thought anything since we evolved from single cell organisms
that had no language.
I tend to agree with Nick that most if not all of our new thoughts are
combinations and mutations of existing thoughts. But that seems to be good
enough.
Of course single celled organisms didn't have thoughts either. But how thought
started is another question. I don't think it started with abstract concepts.
How did we (animals) first manage to convert perceptions into concepts that
could be stored and manipulated? To tell that story clearly would be a very
nice bit of science. But it certainly happened.
-- Russ A
On Thu, Oct 29, 2009 at 10:49 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<[email protected]> 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
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
