Posted by
Nick Thompson on
Oct 30, 2009; 5:49am
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Crutchfield-s-Is-anything-ever-new-tp3917261.html
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,
============================================================
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